Real-time measurement error mitigation for one-way quantum computation
Tobias Hartung, S. Schuster, Joachim von Zanthier, Karl Jansen · Scientific Reports · 2026
Abstract We propose a quantum error mitigation scheme for single-qubit measurement errors, particularly suited for one-way quantum computation. Contrary to well established error mitigation methods for circuit-based quantum computation that require the circuits to be run several times, our method is capable of mitigating measurement errors in real time during the processing measurements in the one-way computation. For that, an ancillary qubit register is entangled with the to-be-measured qubit and additionally measured afterwards. By using a voting protocol on all measurement outcomes, occurring measurement errors can be mitigated in real time while the one-way computation continues. We provide an analytical expression for the probability to detect a measurement error depending on the error rate and the number of ancilla qubits. From this, we derive an estimate of the ancilla register size for a given measurement error rate and a required success probability to detect a measurement error. Additionally, we consider the CNOT gate error in our mitigation method and investigate how this influences the probability to detect a measurement error. Finally, we show in proof-of-principle simulations and in experiments executed on IBM quantum hardware that our method is capable of reducing the measurement errors significantly in a one-way quantum computation with only a small number of ancilla qubits.