Sound certification of memory-bounded quantum computers

Abstract

The rapid advancement of quantum hardware calls for the development of reliable methods to certify its correct functioning. However, existing certification tests often fall short: they either rely on flawless state preparation and measurement or lack soundness guarantees, meaning that they do not rule out incorrect implementations of the target operations by a quantum device. We introduce an approach, which we call quantum system quizzing, for the certification of quantum gates in a practical server-user scenario, where a classical user tests the results of quantum computation performed by a quantum server by checking its responses to a set of predesigned small-sized computational problems. Importantly, this approach does not require trusted state preparation and measurement and is thus inherently free from the associated systematic errors. For a wide range of relevant gate sets, including a universal one, we prove our certification protocol to be sound; i.e., it is guaranteed to reject any incorrect gate implementation, under the assumptions of a known Hilbert space dimension and context independence of error. A major technical challenge that we are first to resolve is recovering the tensor product structure of a multi-qubit system in the memory-bounded single-device setup. Finally, we prove the robustness of our protocol and validate its sample and computational efficiency through extensive numerical experiments. Our protocol is platform-agnostic and introduces a new paradigm for benchmarking and comparing diverse quantum architectures.