Noisy qudit vs multiple qubits: conditions on gate efficiency for enhancing fidelity

As qubit-based platforms face near-term technical challenges in terms of scalability, qudits, d-level bases of quantum information, are being implemented in multiple platforms as an alternative for Quantum Information Processing (QIP). We compare the infidelity scalings of single qudit and multiqubit systems within identical Hilbert space dimensions and noisy environments in the Lindblad formalism. We find them to be gate-independent to first-order and present an analytically-derived critical curve \(({d}^{2}-1)/3{\log }_{2}(d)\) that benchmarks the operational time efficiency of qudits and qubits relative to their decoherence times. This comparison reveals conditions under which qudits offer competitive gate efficiencies compared to leading qubit platforms. Our findings, supported by numerical simulations testing the applicability and limits of the linear response formalism, highlight the relevance of qudits in near-term QIP. This provides a benchmark for evaluating qudit platforms, specifically those with lower dimensionality, in terms of their operational efficiency relative to the qubit state-of-the-art.