Home Noise-Field Sampling and Regime Transitions in Qubit Layout Selection: Hardware Evidence on IBM Superconducting Processors

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Noise-Field Sampling and Regime Transitions in Qubit Layout Selection: Hardware Evidence on IBM Superconducting Processors

Year : 2026

Publisher : Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.

Source Title : IEEE Access

Document Type :

Abstract

Qubit layout selection determining which physical qubits a logical circuit occupies on a superconducting processor is fundamentally a noise-field sampling problem. On IBM Heron r1 and Heron r2 devices, two-qubit gate error varies by nearly one order of magnitude (7-9×) across qubit pairs on the same chip, causing measured fidelity differences up to 0.903 from layout choice alone. We introduce the Gate Noise Sensitivity Index (GNSI), a calibration-weighted linear combination of per-qubit readout error and per-edge two-qubit gate error, derived analytically as a first-order approximation of circuit fidelity under independent, heterogeneous noise channels. For 12 backend-circuit combinations on three IBM processors (133-qubit Heron r1 and 156-qubit Heron r2), GNSI scores are computed for the full pool of 1,320 computationally enumerated candidate layouts; the top-ranked (GNSI-BEST) and bottom-ranked (GNSI-WORST) layouts are then executed on hardware. GNSI-BEST ranks first by score in all 12 instances (Hit@1 = 100% within the enumerated candidate pool) and consistently achieves higher measured fidelity than GNSI-WORST, with Spearman rank correlation ρ = 0.926±0.016 and statistically significant fidelity separation in 9 of 12 paired tests. Initial hardware comparisons on ibm_fez (n = 5) show GNSI-BEST matching or exceeding SABRE-selected fidelity. We further identify a depth-dependent regime transition: gate-error heterogeneity appears to govern ranking in shallow circuits (depth ≤ 15), while qubit-specific T1 variation may dominate for deeper circuits (depth≥ 20). The analytic regime boundary d*(b), computable from calibration data alone, shows agreement within ±2 depth layers across all three backends in initial comparisons; GNSI-Extended incorporating the decoherence term receives an initial hardware comparison on two circuits, with full validation left to future work. These results suggest that layout-dependent fidelity variation may be governed by a calibration-predictable noise field, with direct implications for compiler design and noise-adaptive quantum circuit execution.