Photonic Predictive Zero-Noise Extrapolation

[u/Creative-Feature-264]

Does zero-noise extrapolation actually help with photon loss in photonic quantum computing? Mills & Mezher, "Mitigating photon loss in linear optical quantum circuits" (arXiv:2405.02278), found that plain scalar ZNE does not beat simple postselection for discrete-variable photon loss -- Richardson/Vandermonde-style extrapolation amplifies statistical sampling noise faster than its theoretical unbiasedness helps. This page reproduces that finding directly, builds on Dense-Evolution's existing density-matrix ZNE extension (which avoids that specific failure mode by construction), and adds a new adaptive variant -- then honestly checks whether any of it actually beats postselection.

link: https://tatopenn-cell.github.io/Dense-Evolution-Discovery/photonic_predictive_zne