Benchmark: Cycle benchmarking
Benchmarks / Component level (gates and operations)
Local and global errors of whole cycles of multi-qubit operations, including cross-talk and correlated noise.
- Level
- Component level (gates and operations)
- Maintained by
- Proposed by Erhard et al. (2019).
- European
- Yes: First author and most co-authors are at the University of Innsbruck (Austria), with co-authors at the University of Waterloo and Quantum Benchmark Inc. (Canada) (Europe PMC record of the Nature Communications paper, read on 27 October 2026).
- Reference
- https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.08543
How it is measured
Randomised cycles of operations are repeated and the decay of the measured fidelity gives the error per cycle; demonstrated on up to 10 qubits of an ion-trap computer with total process fidelities from 99.6(1)% (2 qubits) to 86(2)% (10 qubits) for entangling gates.
Limitations and criticisms
- Characterises cycles of a given circuit structure; it does not predict whole-algorithm success alone.
Used in European procurements
None of the procurement documents read for this release names it.
Sources
- A. Erhard et al. (2019). Characterizing large-scale quantum computers via cycle benchmarking. Nature Communications (2019), DOI 10.1038/s41467-019-13068-7; arXiv:1902.08543. Read: abstract page, retrieved 2026-10-23.