On the noise resilience of quantum algorithms

Quantum systems are particularly sensitive to noise, which typically negates all potential quantum advantages in computing or sensing. Thus, noise resilience is crucial to potential demonstrations of useful quantum advantages.

Current quantum computers have advanced enough that they can implement operations in many different ways. This raises the problem of identifying the best implementation of a quantum operation. The most common and intuitive approach is to consider ones with the shortest runtime. I will present an alternative approach where algorithm implementations are chosen to be noise-resilient. To do so, I introduce a general and simple framework to characterize a quantum system’s resilience to noise. Perhaps counter to intuition, the protocols with the shortest runtimes are not always the most resilient ones.