Over-rotation coherent error induced by pseudo-twirling of quantum gates

Abstract: Quantum error mitigation schemes (QEM) have greatly enhanced the performance of quantum computers, mostly by reducing errors caused by interactions with the environment. Nevertheless, the presence of coherence errors, typically arising from miscalibration and inter-qubit crosstalk, is a significant challenge to the scalability of quantum computing. Such errors are often addressed using a refined Pauli twirling scheme called Randomized Compiling (RC) that converts the coherent errors into incoherent errors that can then be mitigated by conventional QEM. Unfortunately for multi-qubit gates, RC is restricted to Clifford gates such as CNOT and CPHASE. However, it has been demonstrated experimentally that a direct implementation of multi-qubit non-Clifford gates, i.e. without using multi-qubit Clifford gates, has reduced the depth of the circuit by a factor of four and more. Recently, a framework called pseudo-twirling (PST) for treating coherent error in multi-qubit non-Clifford gates has been introduced and experimentally demonstrated. We show analytically that a higher order correction to the existing PST theory yields an over-rotation coherent error generated by the PST protocol itself. This PST effect has no analogue in RC. Although the small induced over-rotation can amount to a significant coherent error in deep circuits, we explain why it does not degrade the performance of the gate. Interestingly, we find that a simplified twirling scheme that was introduced and exploited experimentally by Kim et al. also displays an induced over-rotation. We study the conditions under which the two twirling schemes display the same over-rotation behavior.