Fighting Noise before Error Correction: Suppression, Mitigation, and Beyond

Noise is the primary hindrance of quantum computers in unleashing its full potential, and attenuating its effect is necessary for useful quantum computation. While we look forward to error correction in upcoming years, several other techniques have been developed to fight with noise in near term. In this presentation, we shall first look into the different sources of noise in current quantum devices, and discuss some error suppression and mitigation techniques for lowering their effects. We shall take a deeper dive into understanding one of the mitigation methods, namely zero noise extrapolation, and discuss the pipeline required for attaining maximal performance out of these methods 1 . We shall touch upon the results obtained by IBM 2 as evidence of utility provided by these methods in nearterm devices. Finally, we shall briefly introduce other techniques, such as operator back propagation, circuit cutting etc., which can also be used in certain scenarios for further reducing the effect of noise on quantum systems. The goal of this presentation is to enable the listeners to use the proper methods to achieve noise mitigated useful results for their research.