Exploiting Dynamic Quantum Circuits in a Quantum Algorithm with Superconducting Qubits

To date, quantum computation on real, physical devices has largely been limited to simple, time-ordered sequences of unitary operations followed by a final projective measurement. As hardware platforms for quantum computing continue to mature in size and capability, it is imperative to enable quantum circuits beyond their conventional construction. Here we break into the realm of dynamic quantum circuits on a superconducting-based quantum system. Dynamic quantum circuits not only involve the evolution of the quantum state throughout the computation but also periodic measurements of qubits midcircuit and concurrent processing of the resulting classical information on timescales shorter than the execution times of the circuits. Using noisy quantum hardware, we explore one of the most fundamental quantum algorithms, quantum phase estimation, in its adaptive version, which exploits dynamic circuits, and compare the results to a nonadaptive implementation of the same algorithm. We demonstrate that the version of real-time quantum computing with dynamic circuits can yield results comparable to an approach involving classical asynchronous postprocessing, thus opening the door to a new realm of available algorithms on real quantum systems.