The limits of erasure-based postselection for quantum error mitigation

Abstract

In both classical and quantum error correction, heralded erasures are known to be easier to tolerate than unheralded general stochastic errors. Whilst an established benefit of loss-dominant quantum architectures such as photonic qubits, this fact has received renewed interest, with a pivot towards reconstructing other architectures to be erasure-dominant, such as dual-rail transmons. This work investigates exploiting these 'erasure qubits' in the near term by using postselection as a technique for error mitigation, wherein circuit shots detecting any erased qubits are discarded from the computational ensemble and repeated. Firstly, we outline a numerical framework for representing circuit-level erasure noise and present 'erado', an open-source library capable of simulating erasure noise and postselection. Secondly, we investigate the effects of both erasure noise and noise in the erasure checks themselves on the quantum Fourier transform (QFT), in the additional presence of gate depolarising noise. A worked example is provided of postselection fully mitigating against the erasure channel for erasure check error rates less than 3.0%. We also show how a postselected dual-rail system can surpass a fundamental noise floor at the kiloquop scale where a comparable single-rail system cannot, justifying this approach in the NISQ regime before (and, perhaps, combined with) the practical arrival of QEC.