Theoretical and experimental analysis of adaptive quantum computers

Abstract: Fault-tolerant quantum computations require alternating quantum and classical computations, where the classical computations prove vital in detecting and correcting errors in the quantum computation. Recently, interest in using these classical computations has been growing again, not to correct errors, but to perform computations. Various works have looked into these so-called adaptive quantum algorithms. Few works however have looked in the advantages of adaptive quantum algorithms in realistic scenarios. This work provides the first step in this direction. We introduce a worst-case noise model and use it to derive success probabilities for preparing a GHZ state and preparing a $W$-state using either an adaptive quantum algorithm, or using a standard non-adaptive quantum algorithm. Next, we implemented these protocols on quantum hardware and we compare the outcomes to our derived theoretical results. We find that despite their potential, adaptive quantum algorithms currently do not outperform full quantum algorithms.