Circuit connectivity boosts by quantum-classical-quantum interfaces

Abstract

High-connectivity circuits are a major roadblock for current quantum hardware. We propose a hybrid classical-quantum algorithm to simulate such circuits without swap-gate ladders. As the main technical tool, we introduce quantum-classical-quantum interfaces. These replace an experimentally problematic gate (e.g., a long-range one) with single-qubit random measurements followed by state preparations sampled according to a classical quasiprobability simulation of the noiseless gate. Each interface introduces a multiplicative statistical overhead which, remarkably, is independent of the on-chip qubit distance. Hence, by applying interfaces to the longest-range gates in a target circuit, significant reductions in circuit depth and gate infidelity can be attained. We numerically show the efficacy of our method for a Bell-state circuit for two increasingly distant qubits and a variational ground-state solver for the transverse-field Ising model on a ring. Our findings provide a versatile toolbox for error-mitigation and circuit boosts tailored for noisy, intermediate-scale quantum computation.