Estimating the number of gates you have time for
In addition to the gate errors that we have explored in the first two recipes, the end result of your recipes depends on another physical aspect of the qubits that we run on: the T1 and T2 times. We first discussed these in the Explore your qubits to understand T1, T2, and errors recipe:
- T1, or relaxation time: The T1 value is a statistical value of how long it takes for the qubit to spontaneously relax from the "excited" state
to the ground state 
. In essence, T1 is the upper limit, in microseconds, that you have at your disposal to perform high-quality actions on the qubit. - T2, or dephasing time: Similar to T1, the T2 value is a statistical measure of how phase information is lost for a qubit. An example of phase change is when the state
spontaneously changes to 
. Again, if the running time for your circuit starts to approach the T2 time, the quality of your readout data will suffer.
With this data,...
