Variational certification of quantum devices

One of the requirements imposed on the realistic quantum computers is to provide computation results which can be repeated and reproduced. In the situation when one needs to repeat the quantum computation procedure several times, it is crucial that the copies of the quantum devices are similar in the sense of the produced results. In this work, we describe a simple procedure based on variational quantum eigensolver which can be utilized to compare quantum devices. The procedure is developed by combining Choi–Jamiołkowski isomorphism with the variational hybrid quantum–classical procedure for matrix diagonalization. We compare the introduced procedure with the scheme based on the standard bounds for the similarity between quantum operations by analysing its action on random quantum channels. We also discuss the sensitivity of the described procedure to the noise, and we provide numerical results demonstrating its feasibility in realistic scenarios by running the procedure on IBM quantum computer.