Best practices for quantum error mitigation with digital zero-noise extrapolation

Abstract

Digital zero-noise extrapolation (dZNE) has emerged as a common approach for quantum error mitigation (QEM) due to its conceptual simplicity, accessibility, and resource efficiency. In practice, however, properly applying dZNE to extend the computational reach of noisy quantum processors is rife with subtleties. Here, based on literature review and original experiments on noisy simulators, we define best practices for QEM with dZNE for each step of the workflow, including noise amplification, execution on the quantum device, extrapolation to the zero-noise limit, and concatenation with other QEM methods. We hope that this effort to establish best practices for dZNE will be extended to other QEM methods, leading to more reproducible and rigorous calculations on noisy quantum hardware.