Curator's Take
AI Commentary
This article spotlights the emerging “hybrid” error‑reduction stack that will bridge today’s noisy devices and the first fault‑tolerant machines, showing how suppression, mitigation, and lightweight correction can be layered to squeeze out reliable results now. By cataloguing hardware‑specific noise sources and demonstrating concrete software‑driven workflows on real processors, it gives experimentalists a practical roadmap for extending circuit depth without waiting for full error‑correcting codes. The review also clarifies that even in early logical‑qubit regimes, mitigation remains essential—a reminder that the path to scalable quantum advantage will rely on coordinated, multi‑level error management rather than any single silver bullet.
— Mark Eatherly
Summary
Quantum computing is entering a transitional regime between noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) processing and early fault-tolerant quantum computation (FTQC), in which increasingly capable hardware is beginning to support repeated syndrome measurements, partial error correction, and logical-qubit operations, while residual physical and logical errors remain non-negligible. In this regime, error suppression, error mitigation, and quantum error correction are increasingly better viewed as complementary layers of a unified error-reduction strategy rather than as separate approaches, with each acting at a different stage of the quantum computation to improve simulation reliability. Thus, in this review, we provide a practical and forward-looking overview of the principal hardware error sources and the corresponding error suppression and mitigation methods for reducing their impact across the current NISQ-FTQC transition. We discuss hardware-aware circuit design, coherent-error suppression, readout mitigation, noise extrapolation, classical inference, and software-supported workflows, with particular emphasis on their implementation on actual quantum processors. We further examine how error mitigation techniques can be adapted to encoded and logical-qubit settings so that they can operate alongside quantum error correction to suppress residual logical errors and improve the accuracy of computation in the early fault-tolerant regime.