IonQ API Calibrations

Calibrations are snapshots of the performance of the IonQ platform at a given moment of time. The IonQ quantum computers are continuously calibrated, and measurements are taken of the performance of the machine periodically.

In this section, we assume a cirq.ionq.Service object has been instantiated and is called service and cirq and cirq.ionq have been imported:

import cirq
import cirq.ionq as ionq
service = ionq.Service()

See IonQ API Service for how to set up the service.

Fetching information about the device

To get the latest calibration, you simply query the service for the calibration object

calibration = service.get_current_calibration()

The returned object then has data about the target (currently only on QPU) as well as the current performance of the target.

# prints something like
{'1q': {'mean': 0.99717}, '2q': {'mean': 0.9696}, 'spam': {'mean': 0.9961} }


  • 1q and 2q refer to one and two qubit average gate fidelities measured using randomized benchmarking. Technically these refer to the native gates on the device, which are the cirq.XX**(0.5) gate and the cirq.X**(0.5) gate (and also their inverses). Like many architectures cirq.Z**x gates are "free", these gates are compiled out of the circuit. Thus these gates are not included in this gate fidelities.
  • spam here refers to state preparation and measurement error, and can mostly be thought of as the probability of the measurement being correct.

Another useful bit of information are the timings of the gates:

# prints something like
{'t1': 10000, 't2': 0.2, '1q': 1.1e-05, '2q': 0.00021, 'readout': 0.000175, 'reset': 3.5e-05}

These measurements are all returned in seconds

  • t1: the energy relaxation time.
  • t2: the dephasing time.
  • 1q: the time it takes to execute a single qubit gate.
  • 2q: the time it takes to execute a two qubit gate.
  • readout: the time it takes to measure the qubit.
  • reset: the time it takes to reset the ion between shots.

A few other properties of the ionq.Calibration object are

  • num_qubits: the number of qubits on the QPU.
  • connectivity: a set of all the possible qubits that can interact in the set.
  • target: in the future when there are multiple QPUs this will list which target.