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Blind spots of randomized benchmarking under temporal correlations

Varun Srivastava1,*, Abhinash Kumar Roy1,†, Soumik Mahanti1,2, Jasleen Kaur1, Salini Karuvade3, and Alexei Gilchrist1,‡

  • *Contact author: varun.srivastava@students.mq.edu.au
  • †Contact author: abhinash.roy@students.mq.edu.au
  • ‡Contact author: alexei.gilchrist@mq.edu.au
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Phys. Rev. Research 8, 023258 – Published 8 June, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/r1z5-ycqc

Abstract

Randomized benchmarking (RB) is a widely adopted protocol for estimating the average gate fidelity in quantum hardware. However, its standard formulation relies on the assumption of temporally uncorrelated noise, an assumption often violated in current devices. In this work, we derive analytic expressions for the average sequence fidelity (ASF) in the presence of temporally correlated (non-Markovian) noise with classical memory, including cases where such correlations originate from interactions with a quantum environment. We show how the ASF can be interpreted to extract meaningful benchmarking parameters under such noise and identify classes of interaction Hamiltonians that render temporal correlations completely invisible to RB. We further provide operational criteria for witnessing temporal correlations due to quantum memory through RB experiments. Importantly, while classical correlations may remain undetectable in the ASF data, they can nonetheless significantly affect worst-case errors quantified by the diamond norm, a metric central to fault-tolerant quantum computing. In particular, we demonstrate that temporal correlations may suppress worst-case errors, highlighting that temporal correlations may not always have detrimental effects on gate performance.

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Phys. Rev. Research 8, 023258– Published 8 June, 2026
  • Received 22 October 2025
  • Accepted 10 May 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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