Efficient Lindblad synthesis for noise model construction

Abstract: Effective noise models are essential for analyzing and understanding the dynamics of quantum systems, particularly in applications like quantum error mitigation and correction. However, even when noise processes are well-characterized in isolation, the effective noise channels impacting target quantum operations can differ significantly, as different gates experience noise in distinct ways. Here, we present a noise model construction method that builds an effective model from a Lindbladian description of the physical noise processes acting simultaneously to the desired gate operation. It employs the Magnus expansion and Dyson series, and can be utilized for both low-order symbolic and high-order numerical approximations of the noise channel of a multi-qubit quantum gate. We envision multiple use cases of our noise construction method such as (i) computing the corresponding noise channel from a learned Lindbladian, and (ii) generating the noise channel starting with physically motivated Lindbladians for a given hardware architecture. In doing so, we close the gap between physical Lindbladians and operational level noise model parameters. We demonstrate a strong agreement between our symbolic noise construction and full numerical Lindblad simulations for various two-qubit gates, in isolation and in three- and four-qubit scenarios, for a variety of physically motivated noise sources. Our symbolic construction provides a useful breakdown of how noise model parameters depend on the underlying physical noise parameters, which gives qualitative insight into the structure of errors. For instance, our theory provides insight into the interplay of Lindblad noise with the intended gate operations, and can predict how local Lindblad noise can effectively spread into multi-qubit error.