Comparing a Few Qubit Systems for Superconducting Hardware Compatibility and Circuit Design Sensitivity in Qiskit

Abstract

The development of complex circuits for practical applications in the current quantum computing ecosystem is based on basic primitives such as Bell states, which provide superposition, entanglement, and coherence. The range of domain-specific quantum applications has been greatly expanded by the availability of simulators and platforms such as IBM Quantum, which are supported by Qiskit. However, disparities between ideal simulator outputs and actual quantum processing unit (QPU) executions in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era require the application of quantum error mitigation techniques. Limitations arise from hardware constraints in superconducting qubit systems and from the limited resources of classical simulators as quantum circuits grow. Quantum decoherence, which lowers gate fidelity and builds up at the circuit level with increasing depth, is specifically caused by material-induced flaws and interfaces. This creates a clear connection between circuit reliability, device performance, and material attributes. To address this, the current work uses both simulation and actual hardware on the IBM Sherbrooke 127-qubit processor to study three basic circuit classes over 4 to 10 qubits: the quantum Fourier transform, the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state, and the W state. The study examines trade-offs between circuit complexity, noise robustness, and resource utilization by contrasting simulator and QPU results. The results imply that circuit fidelity can serve as an indirect probe of material-limited noise, opening the door to a framework for designing quantum circuits that accounts for both hardware and materials to achieve scalable quantum advantage.