Simulated Fault Injection for Quantum Circuits Based on Simulator Commands

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of evaluating the fault tolerance algorithms and methodologies (FTAMS) designed for quantum circuits, by making use of fault injection techniques. These techniques are inspired from their rich classical counterparts, and were adapted to the quantum computation specific features, including the available error models. Because of their wide spectrum of application, including quantum circuit simulation, and their flexibility in circuit representation (i.e. both behavioral and structural descriptions of a circuit are possible), the hardware description languages (HDLs) appear as the best choice for our simulation experiments. The techniques employed for fault injection are based on simulator commands. The simulation results for the fault-affected circuit were compared to the outputs of a Gold circuit (a faultless circuit) in order to compute the quantum failure rate.