Detector tomography on IBM quantum computers and mitigation of an imperfect measurement

We use quantum detector tomography to characterize the qubit readout in terms of measurement positive operator-valued measures (POVMs) on IBM quantum computers IBM Q 5 Tenerife and IBM Q 5 Yorktown. Our results suggest that the characterized detector model deviates from the ideal projectors, ranging from 10 to 40%. This is mostly dominated by classical errors, evident from the shrinkage of arrows from the poles in the corresponding Bloch-vector representations. There are also small deviations that are not "classical," of order 3% or less, represented by the tilt of the arrows from the z axis. Further improvement on this characterization can be made by adopting two- or more-qubit detector models instead of independent single-qubit detectors for all the qubits in one device. We also find evidence indicating correlations in the detector behavior, i.e., the detector characterization is slightly altered (to a few percent) when other qubits and their detectors are in operation. Such peculiar behavior is consistent with characterization from the more sophisticated approach of the gate set tomography. We also discuss how the characterized detectors' POVMs, despite deviation from the ideal projectors, can be used to estimate the ideal detection distribution.