Error-mitigated quantum gates exceeding physical fidelities in a trapped-ion system

Various quantum applications can be reduced to estimating expectation values, which are inevitably deviated by operational and environmental errors. Although errors can be tackled by quantum error correction, the overheads are far from being affordable for near-term technologies. To alleviate the detrimental effects of errors on the estimation of expectation values, quantum error mitigation techniques have been proposed, which require no additional qubit resources. Here we benchmark the performance of a quantum error mitigation technique based on probabilistic error cancellation in a trapped-ion system. Our results clearly show that effective gate fidelities exceed physical fidelities, i.e., we surpass the break-even point of eliminating gate errors, by programming quantum circuits. The error rates are effectively reduced from (1.10 ± 0.12) × 10−3 to (1.44 ± 5.28) × 10−5 and from (0.99 ± 0.06) × 10−2 to (0.96 ± 0.10) × 10−3 for single- and two-qubit gates, respectively. Our demonstration opens up the possibility of implementing high-fidelity computations on a near-term noisy quantum device.