An Energy Estimation Benchmark for Quantum Computing Hardware

Certifying the performance of available quantum computing hardware requires standardized tests. We propose a simple energy estimation benchmark to scrutinize actual output against gate and readout errors reported for the IBM Quantum System One platform, where we collected unprecedented amount of data from several devices, mostly from the one in Ehningen, Germany. We observe oscillations of the benchmark data with a characteristic timescale of two hours, as well as outliers. This suggests that current mitigation techniques need to be adapted to account for nontrivial time dependencies of the devices’ output.