Single-Copy Certification of Two-Qubit Gates Without Entanglement

Abstract

A quantum state transformation can be generally approximated by single-and two-qubit gates. This, however, does not hold with noisy intermediate-scale quantum technologies due to the errors appearing in the gate operations, where errors of two-qubit gates such as controlled-NOT and SWAP operations are dominated. In this work we present a cost efficient single-copy certification for a realization of a two-qubit gate in the presence of depolarization noise, where we aim to identify if the realization is noise free, or not. We show that entangled resources such as entangled states and a joint measurement are not necessary for the purpose, i.e., a noise-free two-qubit gate is not needed to certify an implementation of a two-qubit gate. We present a proof-of-principle demonstration with photonic qubits.