Exploring your qubits to understand T1, T2, errors, and gates

Let's start off with a quick overview of some things that can go wrong when you send your perfectly working and simulator-verified quantum program to an actual, physical quantum computer. As we have seen, as soon as we step away from our perfect simulated qubits and start using physical qubits that work quantum-mechanically, we also have to contend with another physical feature of reality: noise.

In a quantum computer, the noise differs between backends, between qubits on a backend, between different types of gates, and between the readouts of each qubit. Building and programming quantum computers really is a complex task.

Getting ready

The file required for this recipe can be downloaded from here: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Quantum-Computing-in-Practice-with-Qiskit-and-IBM-Quantum-Experience/blob/master/Chapter08/ch8_r1_gates_data.py.

This recipe builds on the work we did in Chapter 5, Touring...