Classical benchmarking of zero noise extrapolation beyond the exactly-verifiable regime

In a recent work a quantum error mitigation protocol was applied to the expectation values obtained from circuits on the IBM Eagle quantum processor with up $127$ - qubits with up to $60 \; - \; \mbox{CNOT}$ layers. To benchmark the efficacy of this quantum protocol a physically motivated quantum circuit family was considered that allowed access to exact solutions in different regimes. The family interpolated between Clifford circuits and was additionally evaluated at low depth where exact validation is practical. It was observed that for highly entangling parameter regimes the circuits are beyond the validation of matrix product state and isometric tensor network state approximation methods. Here we compare the experimental results to matrix product operator simulations of the Heisenberg evolution, find they provide a closer approximation than these pure-state methods by exploiting the closeness to Clifford circuits and limited operator growth. Recently other approximation methods have been used to simulate the full circuit up to its largest extent. We observe a discrepancy of up to $20\%$ among the different classical approaches so far, an uncertainty comparable to the bootstrapped error bars of the experiment. Based on the different approximation schemes we propose modifications to the original circuit family that challenge the particular classical methods discussed here.