Stochastic errors in quantum instruments

Abstract: Fault-tolerant quantum computation requires non-destructive quantum measurements with classical feed-forward. Many experimental groups are actively working towards implementing such capabilities and so they need to be accurately evaluated. As with unitary channels, an arbitrary imperfect implementation of a quantum instrument is difficult to analyze. In this paper, we define a class of quantum instruments that correspond to stochastic errors and thus are amenable to standard analysis methods. We derive efficiently computable upper- and lower-bounds on the diamond distance between two quantum instruments. Furthermore, we show that, for the special case of uniform stochastic instruments, the diamond distance and the natural generalization of the process infidelity to quantum instruments coincide and are equal to a well-defined probability of an error occurring during the measurement.