Error mitigation and the prospect of near term applications

Abstract

Near-term applications of early quantum devices, such as quantum simulations, rely on accurate estimates of expectation values to become relevant. Decoherence and gate errors lead to wrong estimates. This problem was, at least in theory, remedied with the advent of quantum error correction. However, the overhead that is needed to implement a fully fault-tolerant gate set with current codes and current devices seems prohibitively large. In turn, steady progress is made in improving the quality of the quantum hardware. This leads to the question: what computational tasks could be accomplished with only limited, or no error correction? In this talk we discuss recent advances in techniques that have become known as quantum error mitigation. These methods are aimed at increasing the quality of expectation values in short-depth quantum circuits.