Kenneth Rudinger: QCVV: Making Quantum Computers Less Broken

Quantum computing hardware capabilities have grown tremendously over the past decade, as evidenced by demonstrations of both quantum advantage and error-corrected logical qubits. These breakthroughs have been driven, in part, by advances in quantum characterization, verification, and validation (QCVV). I will discuss how QCVV provides a hardware-agnostic framework for assessing the performance of quantum computers; I will describe in detail how specific QCVV protocols (such as gate set tomography and robust phase estimation) have been used to characterize and significantly improve the performance of quantum hardware. Time-permitting, I will then turn to the problem of adapting extant characterization protocols for fault-tolerant hardware.