Effect of hardware noise on sampling fidelity

Determine the effect of hardware noise on the sampling fidelity of the constraint-preserving QAOA sidechain-packing pipeline when implemented on real quantum devices.

Background

The reported experiments use classical state-vector simulation of a QAOA circuit incorporating W-state initialization, a cyclic XY mixer, and a cost Hamiltonian encoding protein sidechain energies. The paper does not evaluate execution on physical quantum hardware.

The authors explicitly identify as unresolved how hardware noise will affect sampling fidelity when the method is deployed on real quantum devices, which is important for determining whether the simulated performance and shot-scaling estimates persist under realistic implementation conditions.