Benchmarking a trapped-ion quantum computer with 30 qubits
Jwo-Sy Chen, Erik Nielsen, Matthew Ebert, Volkan Inlek, Kenneth Wright, V. Chaplin, Andrii Maksymov, Eduardo Páez, Amrit Poudel, Peter Maunz, John King Gamble
Abstract
Quantum computers are rapidly becoming more capable, with dramatic increases in both qubit count \cite{kim2023evidence} and quality \cite{moses2023race}. Among different hardware approaches, trapped-ion quantum processors are a leading technology for quantum computing, with established high-fidelity operations and architectures with promising scaling. Here, we demonstrate and thoroughly benchmark the IonQ Forte system: configured as a single-chain 30-qubit trapped-ion quantum computer with all-to-all operations. We assess the performance of our quantum computer operation at the component level via direct randomized benchmarking (DRB) across all 30 choose 2 = 435 gate pairs. We then show the results of application-oriented \cite{IonQ_AQ20_2022}\cite{qedcPeerReviewed} benchmarks and show that the system passes the suite of algorithmic qubit (AQ) benchmarks up to #AQ 29. Finally, we use our component-level benchmarking to build a system-level model to predict the application benchmarking data through direct simulation. While we find that the system-level model correlates with the experiment in predicting application circuit performance, we note quantitative discrepancies indicating significant out-of-model errors, leading to higher predicted performance than what is observed. This highlights that as quantum computers move toward larger and higher-quality devices, characterization becomes more challenging, suggesting future work required to push performance further.