Distinguishing unitary gates on the IBM quantum processor

An unknown unitary gate, which is secretly chosen from several known ones, can always be distinguished perfectly. In this paper, we implement such a task on IBM’s quantum processor. More precisely, we experimentally demonstrate the discrimination of two qubit unitary gates, the identity gate and the $\frac{2}{3}$ π-phase shift gate, using two discrimination schemes — the parallel scheme and the sequential scheme. We program these two schemes on the ibmqx4, a 5-qubit superconducting quantum processor via IBM cloud, with the help of the QSI modules. We report that both discrimination schemes achieve success probabilities at least 85%.