What the study found
The study found that a hardware-efficient Mølmer–Sørensen gate, an entangling operation first known from trapped-ion quantum systems, can work on superconducting quantum hardware with performance close to the device’s native controlled-NOT gate. The authors report a process fidelity of 92.47% on IBM Quantum processors.
Why the authors say this matters
The authors conclude that non-native entangling gates can be optimized to perform on par with hardware-native operations. They also say this expands the effective gate set for algorithm design on fixed-architecture processors and provides a benchmark for cross-platform gate evaluation, underscoring the role of hardware-aware compilation in noisy intermediate-scale quantum, or NISQ, computing.
What the researchers tested
The researchers implemented a hardware-efficient version of the Mølmer–Sørensen gate and evaluated it on IBM Quantum superconducting processors. They used quantum process tomography, a method for characterizing how a quantum process acts on states, to measure performance on real hardware.
What worked and what didn't
The gate achieved a process fidelity of 92.47% on the hardware, which the abstract describes as competitive with the device’s native controlled-NOT gate fidelity of 93.02%. For the |00⟩ input state, it prepared the target Bell state with 94.2% success probability, which the authors say confirms correct logical operation.
What to keep in mind
The abstract only reports results from IBM Quantum superconducting processors, so the findings are limited to that hardware context. No additional limitations or caveats are described in the available summary.
Key points
- A hardware-efficient Mølmer–Sørensen gate was implemented on superconducting quantum processors.
- The reported process fidelity on real hardware was 92.47%.
- That fidelity was described as competitive with the device’s native controlled-NOT gate fidelity of 93.02%.
- For the |00⟩ input state, the gate prepared the target Bell state with 94.2% success probability.
- The authors say the work expands the effective gate set for fixed-architecture processors and supports hardware-aware compilation in NISQ computing.
Disclosure
- Research title:
- Superconducting Mølmer–Sørensen gate matches native gate performance
- Authors:
- M. AbuGhanem
- Institutions:
- Ain Shams University
- Publication date:
- 2026-04-21
- OpenAlex record:
- View
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