Separate and efficient characterization of state-preparation and measurement errors using single-qubit operations

Abstract

In many platforms, errors from state-preparation and measurement (SPAM) dominate over single-qubit gate errors. To inform further hardware improvements and the development of more effective SPAM mitigation strategies, it is necessary to separately characterize the error contributions from state-preparation (SP) and measurement (M). Here, we show how to construct a protocol that can efficiently and separately characterize the SP and M error parameters by using only high-fidelity single-qubit gates and repeated single-qubit measurements without reset. The measurements are assumed to be non-destructive and M errors are taken to be (spatially and temporally) uncorrelated and classical. Notably, the circuit depth of the protocol is independent of system size, and the target parameters may be characterized to a precision that is only limited by the number of experimental repetitions. We employ our protocol for the parallel characterization of SPAM errors on multiple qubits in the IBM Quantum Platform devices, where we find SP infidelities up to $6.57\%$ and readout assignment errors up to $19.1\%$. Using numerical simulations, we also demonstrate how measurement-error mitigation that does not properly account for SP errors generally leads to a biased estimate of measured observable expectation values.