Understanding the Impact of Cutting in Quantum Circuits Reliability to Transient Faults

Quantum Computing is a highly promising new computation paradigm. Unfortunately, quantum bits (qubits) are extremely fragile and their state can be gradually or suddenly modified by intrinsic noise or external perturbation. In this paper, we target the sensitivity of quantum circuits to radiation-induced transient faults. We consider quantum circuit cuts that split the circuit into smaller independent portions, and understand how faults propagate in each portion. As we show, the cuts have different vulnerabilities, and our methodology successfully identifies the circuit portion that is more likely to contribute to the overall circuit error rate. Our evaluation shows that a circuit cut can have a 4.6x higher probability than the other cuts, when corrupted, to modify the circuit output. Our study, identifying the most critical cuts, moves towards the possibility of implementing a selective hardening for quantum circuits.