Susceptibility of trapped-ion qubits to low-dose radiation sources

Cui, Jiafeng; Rasmusson, A. J.; D’Onofrio, Marissa; Xie, Yuanheng; Wolanski, Evangeline; Richerme, Philip

doi:10.1088/1361-6455/ac076c

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…In this Section, we give a background about quantum computing and the impact of ionizing radiation on qubits, which is essential to understand and appreciate the contribution of our paper. As there is not yet sufficient data on radiation effects on trapped-ion qubits (besides the low-dose test documented in [16]), we will focus the discussion on superconducting materials. Nonetheless, the concepts we introduce, the fault injection framework we design, and the impact of the results we present are independent on the qubit technology, once the fault model is defined.…”

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In fact, recently pioneer works have demonstrated that, besides noise, it is necessary to harden superconducting qubits also from external radiation [9], [10], [11], [12] as the interaction of ionizing particles significantly reduces the fault tolerance of qubits [13], [14], [15]. Trapped-ion qubits are found to be robust to low-dose low-energy radiation [16], but no data is available for heavier particles, yet. As most studies focus on superconducting qubits we will consider this technology as case study.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Systematic Methodology to Compute the Quantum Vulnerability Factors for Quantum Circuits

Oliveira,

Giusto,

Baheri

et al. 2024

IEEE Trans. Dependable and Secure Comput.

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Quantum computing is one of the most promising technology advances of the latest years. Qubits are highly sensitive to noise, which can make the output useless. Lately, it has been shown that superconducting qubits are extremely susceptible to external sources of faults, such as ionizing radiation. When adopted in large scale, radiation-induced errors are expected to become a serious challenge for qubits reliability. We propose an evaluation of the impact of transient faults in the execution of quantum circuits on superconducting chips. Inspired by the Architectural and Program Vulnerability Factors, widely used for classical computation, we propose the Quantum Vulnerability Factor (QVF) to measure the impact of qubit corruption on the circuit output. We model faults, and design a fault injector, based on the latest studies on real machines and radiation experiments. We report the finding of more than 388, 000, 000 fault injections, considering single and double faults, on three algorithms, identifying the faults and qubits that are more likely to impact the output. We give guidelines on how to map the qubits in real devices to reduce the output error and to reduce the probability of having a radiation-induced corruption modifying the output. Finally, we compare simulations with experiments on physical quantum computers.

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Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Systematic Methodology to Compute the Quantum Vulnerability Factors for Quantum Circuits

Oliveira,

Giusto,

Baheri

et al. 2024

IEEE Trans. Dependable and Secure Comput.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…on radiation effects on trapped-ion qubits (besides the lowdose test documented in [19]), we will focus the discussion on superconducting materials. Nonetheless, the concepts we introduce, the fault injection framework we design, and the impact of the results we present are independent on the qubit technology, once the fault model is defined.…”

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

QuFI: a Quantum Fault Injector to Measure the Reliability of Qubits and Quantum Circuits

Oliveira¹,

Giusto²,

Dri³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Quantum computing is an up-and-coming technology that is expected to revolutionize the computation paradigm in the next few years. Qubits, the primary computing elements of quantum circuits, exploit the quantum physics proprieties to increase the parallelism and speed of computation drastically. Unfortunately, besides being intrinsically noisy, qubits have also been shown to be highly susceptible to external sources of faults, such as ionizing radiation. The latest discoveries highlight a much higher radiation sensitivity of qubits than traditional transistors and identify a much more complex fault model than bit-flip.We propose a framework to identify the quantum circuits sensitivity to radiation-induced faults and the probability for a fault in a qubit to propagate to the output. Based on the latest studies and radiation experiments performed on real quantum machines, we model the transient faults in a qubit as a phase shift with a parametrized magnitude. Additionally, our framework can inject multiple qubit faults, tuning the phase shift magnitude based on the proximity of the qubit to the particle strike location. As we show in the paper, the proposed fault injector is highly flexible, and it can be used on both quantum circuit simulators and real quantum machines. We report the finding of more than 285, 249, 536 injections on the Qiskit simulator and 53, 248 injections on real IBM machines. We consider three quantum algorithms and identify the faults and qubits that are more likely to impact the output. We also consider the fault propagation dependence on the circuit scale, showing that the reliability profile for some quantum algorithms is scale-dependent, with increased impact from radiation-induced faults as we increase the number of qubits. Finally, we also consider multi qubits faults, showing that they are much more critical than single faults. The fault injector and the data presented in this paper are available in a public repository to allow further analysis.

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“…Recently, pioneer works have demonstrated that it is necessary to harden superconducting qubits also from ex-ternal radiation [9], [10], [11], [12] as the interaction of ionizing particles significantly reduces the fault tolerance of qubits [13], [14], [15]. Trapped-ion qubits are found to be robust to low-dose low-energy radiation [16], but no data is available for heavier particles, yet. Already being one of the challenges for today's classical computing systems, then, ionizing radiation is expected to be a major issue also for future quantum (super) computers [10], [12].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Systematic Methodology to Compute the Quantum Vulnerability Factors for Quantum Circuits

Oliveira¹,

Giusto²,

Baheri³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Quantum computing is one of the most promising technology advances of the latest years. Once only a conceptual idea to solve physics simulations, quantum computation is today a reality, with numerous machines able to execute quantum algorithms. One of the hardest challenges in quantum computing is reliability. Qubits are highly sensitive to noise, which can make the output useless. Moreover, lately it has been shown that superconducting qubits are extremely susceptible to external sources of faults, such as ionizing radiation. When adopted in large scale, radiation-induced errors are expected to become a serious challenge for qubits reliability. In this paper, we propose an evaluation of the impact of transient faults in the execution of quantum circuits. Inspired by the Architectural and Program Vulnerability Factors, widely adopted to characterize the reliability of classical computing architectures and algorithms, we propose the Quantum Vulnerability Factor (QVF) as a metric to measure the impact that the corruption of a qubit has on the circuit output probability distribution. First, we model faults based on the latest studies on real machines and recently performed radiation experiments. Then, we design a quantum fault injector, built over Qiskit, and characterize the propagation of faults in quantum circuits. We report the finding of more than 15,000,000 fault injections, evaluating the reliability of three quantum circuits and identifying the faults and qubits that are more likely than others to impact the output. With our results, we give guidelines on how to map the qubits in the real quantum computer to reduce the output error and to reduce the probability of having a radiation-induced corruption to modify the output. Finally, we compare the simulation results with experiments on physical quantum computers.

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Susceptibility of trapped-ion qubits to low-dose radiation sources

Cited by 5 publications

References 34 publications

A Systematic Methodology to Compute the Quantum Vulnerability Factors for Quantum Circuits

A Systematic Methodology to Compute the Quantum Vulnerability Factors for Quantum Circuits

QuFI: a Quantum Fault Injector to Measure the Reliability of Qubits and Quantum Circuits

A Systematic Methodology to Compute the Quantum Vulnerability Factors for Quantum Circuits

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