Experimental demonstration of the advantage of adaptive quantum circuits
quant-ph
/ Authors
Michael Foss-Feig, Arkin Tikku, Tsung-Cheng Lu, Karl Mayer, Mohsin Iqbal, Thomas M. Gatterman, Justin A. Gerber, Kevin Gilmore, Dan Gresh, Aaron Hankin
and 9 more authors
Nathan Hewitt, Chandler V. Horst, Mitchell Matheny, Tanner Mengle, Brian Neyenhuis, Henrik Dreyer, David Hayes, Timothy H. Hsieh, Isaac H. Kim
/ Abstract
Adaptive quantum circuits employ unitary gates assisted by mid-circuit measurement, classical computation on the measurement outcome, and the conditional application of future unitary gates based on the result of the classical computation. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate that even a noisy adaptive quantum circuit of constant depth can achieve a task that is impossible for any purely unitary quantum circuit of identical depth: the preparation of long-range entangled topological states with high fidelity. We prepare a particular toric code ground state with fidelity of at least $76.9\pm 1.3\%$ using a constant depth ($d=4$) adaptive circuit, and rigorously show that no unitary circuit of the same depth and connectivity could prepare this state with fidelity greater than $50\%$.