Variational quantum algorithms (VQA) have emerged with a wide variety of applications. One question to ask is either they can efficiently be implemented and executed on existing architectures. Current hardware suffers from uncontrolled noise that can alter the expected results of one calculation. The nature of this noise is different from one technology to another. In this work, we choose to investigate a technology that is intrinsically resilient to bit-flips: cat-state qubits. To this end, we implement two noise models. The first one is uniformly depolarizing in the sense that it is used in the literature to cover different hardware types. The second one is specific to cat-state qubits. We perform simulations on two types of problems that can be formulated with VQAs [the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) and the variational quantum linear solver (VQLS)], study the impact of noise on the evolution of the cost function, and extract noise-level thresholds from which a noise-resilient regime can be considered. By tackling compilation issues, we discuss the need for implementing hardware-specific noise models as uniformly depolarizing ones can lead to misleading conclusions regarding the regime of noise that is acceptable for an algorithm to run.

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• Quantum algorithms
• Quantum circuits
• Quantum computation