Practical Implementations of QECCs in IBM Q Experience

Question

I am learning how to program the IBM Q Experience quantum computers in order to learn more about how does it work and in order to perform some experiments in it. By doing so I was wondering what are the most advanced things that have been done in such computers that actually are an advance for quantum technologies.

More specfically, I am interested in what have been done in quantum error correction code implementation and testing in those, and if some papers about those implementations and techniques used are available.

Answer 1

The publicly available IBM devices don't yet have the connectivity to realize quantum error correcting codes that both detect and correct a full set of quantum errors. But we can certainly do proof-of-principle experiments on the tools and techniques required. Here are the experiments I know of

Error correction experiments done (or doable) on a 5 qubit device:

• Detecting arbitrary quantum errors via stabilizer measurements on a sublattice of the surface code
• Is error detection helpful on IBM 5Q chips?
• Experimental demonstration of fault-tolerant state preparation with superconducting qubits
• Protecting quantum memories using coherent parity check codes

Error correction experiments on the 16 qubit device.

• A repetition code of 15 qubits

^{Disclosure: The last one is mine.}

Answer 2

You might find the paper "Automated Error Correction in IBM Quantum Computer and Explicit Generalization" (2017) by Panigrahi et al. relevant. As for "what are the most advanced things that have been done in such computers that actually are an advance for quantum technologies", if you search a bit on arXiv you'll find quite a few relevant papers published by them. One such recent example which I personally had found quite interesting is: "Application of quantum scrambling in Rydberg atom on IBM quantum computer" (2018).

^{Disclosure: I'm currently an undergraduate member of Prof. Panigrahi's group.}