Characterizing states and measurements: principles and approaches

The problem of separately characterizing state preparation and measurement (SPAM) processes has not been frequently discussed in the literature. In this talk, I will first review the theoretical challenge behind SPAM characterization due to a gauge freedom, and then describe two different protocols that achieve this task. The first one can be understood as an effective propagation of state preparation noise from the target system to an ancillary qubit, whereas the second one utilizes measurements and post-selection to reduce the state preparation noise and can be interpreted as a form of algorithmic cooling. For the first method, I will present experimental and simulation data obtained from real quantum processors. For the second method, I will analyze its overhead through an upper bound on the expected number of runs to achieve a given error-reduction ratio.