Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2605.15233

Measuring Control-Plane Openness in Near-Term Quantum Computing: A Rubric, Its Validation, and an Application to Thirteen Vendor Stacks

Abstract

Public access to pulse-level and control-electronics interfaces in commercial quantum computing has bifurcated. This paper proposes a six-axis rubric for measuring control-plane openness, the layer between gate-level circuit specification and physical control electronics, defined operationally so that the same evidence produces the same grade across vendors. The rubric is validated three ways: a blinded re-grading pass that tests whether the cited evidence and the level definitions alone reproduce the recorded grades, a boundary-case methodology that fixes where each level begins and ends, and a published grading protocol that lets others reproduce and contest any cell. A time-point comparison anchored on the February 2025 removal of pulse-level access from IBM hardware establishes that the rubric measures change rather than describing a snapshot. The rubric is applied to thirteen commercial vendors across superconducting, trapped-ion, neutral-atom, and photonic modalities as of May 1, 2026, and one of the three harms it detects is demonstrated through a reproduction-access audit of five pre-2025 IBM Qiskit Pulse experiments, carried through to a structural port to Rigetti Quil-T. The catalog ships as a machine-readable artifact under CC-BY-4.0 with per-cell source URLs (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20163276). The readings will go stale; the rubric is the contribution that survives them.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Rylan Malarchick. 2026-07-09. Measuring Control-Plane Openness in Near-Term Quantum Computing: A Rubric, Its Validation, and an Application to Thirteen Vendor Stacks. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15233

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Enhanced measurements on quantum computers via the simultaneous probing of non-commuting Pauli operators

Measuring the state of quantum computers is a highly non-trivial task, with implications for virtually all quantum algorithms. A promising avenue is multi-copy schemes, where identical copies of a quantum state are measured jointly so that all Pauli operators within the considered observable can be simultaneously assessed. Here, we present a first implementation of such a two-copy scheme in a measurement protocol. Based on Bayesian statistics, it accurately estimates not only the average of the desired observable but also the error en route. This enables an adaptive shot-allocation algorithm that preferentially samples the most uncertain Pauli terms. In regimes with many non-commuting Pauli operators, this ``double'' scheme can outperform the state-of-the-art measurement protocol in minimizing total shots for a given precision. We also numerically confirm the finding in previous theoretical works that the two-copy scheme incurs an overhead due to the square-root relationship between the variance of measured quantities and the number of measurement shots.

quant-ph

Thermodynamics of a phaseonium-driven optomechanical Otto engine

We study an optomechanical Otto engine whose working medium is a single-mode cavity driven by beams of coherently prepared three-level phaseonium atoms. The atoms are not thermal reservoirs in the Gibbs sense; rather, their populations and ground-state coherence set the detailed-balance ratio of the cavity collision map, so that the field relaxes to a Gibbs state at an operational apparent temperature. We combine the finite-time collision-model dynamics with radiation-pressure work extraction and compare three reservoir preparations: a thermal reference at the same apparent temperatures, an incoherent atomic beam with the same populations, and the coherent phaseonium beam. We show that the phaseonium isochore charges the cavity passively: the cavity ergotropy and energy-basis coherence remain zero up to numerical precision, while the state converges to the Gibbs fixed point selected by the apparent detailed balance. We further estimate lower bounds on the cost of preparing the atomic populations and coherence, showing that the relevant advantage of phaseonium is a resource-preparation tradeoff rather than a cost-free enhancement over a thermal bath at the same temperature. Finally, we assess the finite-time performance of a two-cavity cascade with additive mechanical work accounting. Over the investigated coherence-phase range, the cascade produces approximately $47\%$--$52\%$ more power than the single-cavity engine while requiring only $65\%$--$68\%$ of the hot and cold phaseonium atoms needed by two independent engines, resulting in a $9\%$--$15\%$ enhancement of power per injected atom over a complete cycle.

quant-ph

Dynamical Correlation of the Post-quench Non-thermal Equilibrium State

After a quantum quench, the integrable system is expected to relax to a non-thermal equilibrium state (NTES) whose local properties are believed to be governed by a generalized Gibbs ensemble (GGE). Combining quench action and the form factor approach, we compute the field-field correlation in the NTES produced by an interaction quench of the Lieb-Liniger model. The spectral distribution is shown to be qualitatively different from that of a thermal equilibrium state (TES): a new dispersion branch appears whose microscopic mechanism can be traced to the algebraic decaying tail for the root density distribution function, and indicates the existence of a broader family of NTES featuring similar spectral property.

quant-ph