isobelaloisio commented 2 years ago

Abstract

Noise in quantum computers is often seen as a major obstacle which limits the accuracy of any quantum computation. But is there beauty amongst all of this mess?

Have you ever wondered what quantum noise looks like? Well, hopefully through this project we can find out! The aim is to generate art, where the colours or size of shapes we see are proportional to the type and level of noise present in our quantum computations

Description

One idea is to represent the output of a quantum circuit as a grid of coloured squares, where each square corresponds to the outcome of a single run of our experiment, and each possible bit-string outcome is assigned a different colour.

We can choose a quantum circuit so that in the 'ideal' case with no noise, each square will be the same colour.

Then, using the Qiskit Aer noise module we can build customisable noise into our circuit. We would then expect to see different bit-string outcomes with some probability. These would appear as different colours in our grid. Hopefully, we can generate a visual representation of bit-flip errors, phase-flip errors, or depolarising errors (to name a few).

If we have time we may even be able to compare our results with those seen on a real quantum computer where we cannot control the noise model.

It might even be interesting to see how much we can control the noise on a real device - can we reproduce the 'art' we see in our simulations by tuning our environment.

Another possibility is to explore the effects of quantum error correction on our noise.

Along the way we will hopefully have some fun learning about the sources of noise in quantum computers. And maybe even discover that noise in quantum devices can have some interesting applications!