PCA-based post-processing in quantum process tomography: An experimental study

Quantum Process Tomography (QPT) is a fundamental technique to characterize quantum operations. However, its precision gets hampered while running in real quantum hardware due to inherent noise. In our study, we propose a post-processing method using principal component analysis (PCA) to improve the fidelity of noisy gates. We first implemented the standard QPT on various gates ranging from single-qubit to three-qubit in simulation under depolarizing error scenarios and on Fake IBM_Brisbane and ran single and two-qubit gates (H, CX, and SQSCZ) on real quantum hardware (IBM_Brisbane); the three-qubit CCX is evaluated in simulation only. After that, the reconstructed Choi matrix is decomposed into real and imaginary components. Then, by applying a PCA-based approach, we show steady improvements in a variety of quantitative performance indicators in addition to process fidelity while also maintaining the physical constraints of the Choi matrix. Additionally, PCA performed better or similarly when compared to CVX-based maximum-likelihood reconstruction and linear inversion. Although PCA improves QPT reconstructions, it is unable to address the fundamental scalability issue of QPT since it cannot overcome the exponential scaling with qubit number.