Wigner's Friend as a Circuit: Inter-Branch Communication Witness Benchmarks on Superconducting Quantum Hardware

Christopher Altman

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arXiv · 2601.16004

Wigner's Friend as a Circuit: Inter-Branch Communication Witness Benchmarks on Superconducting Quantum Hardware

Christopher Altman

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Abstract

We implement and benchmark on IBM Quantum hardware the circuit family proposed by Violaris for estimating operational inter-branch communication witnesses, defined as correlations in classical measurement records produced by compiled Wigner's-friend-style circuits. We realize a five-qubit instance of the protocol as an inter-register message-transfer pattern within a single circuit, rather than physical signaling, and evaluate its behavior under realistic device noise and compilation constraints. The circuit encodes branch-conditioned evolution of an observer subsystem whose dynamics depend on a control qubit, followed by a controlled transfer operation that probes correlations between conditional measurement contexts. Executing on the ibm_fez backend with 20000 shots, we observe population-based visibility of 0.877, coherence witnesses of 0.840 and -0.811 along orthogonal axes, and a phase-sensitive magnitude of approximately 1.17. While the visibility metric is insensitive to some classes of dephasing, the coherence witnesses provide complementary sensitivity to off-diagonal noise. This work does not test or discriminate among interpretations of quantum mechanics. Instead, it provides a reproducible operational constraint pipeline for evaluating detectability of non-ideal channels relative to calibrated device noise.

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Christopher Altman. 2026-01-22. Wigner's Friend as a Circuit: Inter-Branch Communication Witness Benchmarks on Superconducting Quantum Hardware. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16004

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