Azure backend ignoring meas_level=2

Question

I'd like to retrieve from IonQ QPU provided by Azure the per-shot measurements. Azure recommends the results are retrieved via Qiskit. The standard Qiskit command for that is: shots_mem_list=job.result().get_memory(0) which will deliver a list of bit-strings: ['101011', '101111', '000100', '111100',...]

But to make it work the job needs to be submitted to the backend with 2 additional flags: meas_level=2 and memory=True.

 backend.run(circ, count=100, meas_level=2, memory=True) 

However, Azure is ignoring meas_level flag:

meas_level is not a known attribute of class <class 'azure.quantum._client.models._models_py3.JobDetails'> and will be ignored

As a consequence Qiskit result.get_memory(0) command produces an error:

qiskit.exceptions.QiskitError: 'No memory for experiment "0". Please verify that you either ran a measurement level 2 job with the memory flag set, eg., "memory=True", or a measurement level 0/1 job.'

Is it possible to invoke azure.quantum.backend with meas_level=2 argument to be passed to the backend?

Answer 1

No, Azure Quantum doesn't support setting memory=True on a backend yet. See: https://github.com/microsoft/qdk-python/issues/225

The only workaround is to simulate the individual results by populating the memory on the client using the same probability distribution as the results from the job, something like:

result = backend.run(circuit, count=100).result()
memory = random.choices(list(result.keys()), weights=result.values(), k=100)
print(memory)

the values will be statiscally equivalent, but they are of course not the actual measurements that you got from the device.