Date of Award

9-2021

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Laurence D. Merkle, PhD

Abstract

Future national security can be strengthened by verifying and securing the quantum computing supply chain. This dissertation proposes physically unclonable characteristics (PUCs), a method of quantum hardware verification inspired by classical physically unclonable functions, for future application to quantum processors implemented with transmon qubits. Qualitative and quantitative analysis is provided on the development of PUCs, including identifying qubit characteristics and qubit discrimination methods suitable for PUCs. Characteristics tested on IBM Quantum services include T1 and T2 coherence times, single-qubit and multi-qubit gate error rates, readout error rates, quantum process tomography metrics, and random benchmarking metrics. Results show that non-parametric qubit discrimination methods are best-suited for the characteristics tested, but require refinement before real-world implementation can be achieved.

AFIT Designator

AFIT-ENG-DS-21-S-007

DTIC Accession Number

AD1149659

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