Quality Metrics

Quality Metrics are the measures of how well qubits perform, as opposed to how many there are, on which the book says current quantum systems must improve by two to three orders of magnitude to meet PulseCore validation standards. They appear in the book's benchmarking of current platforms and its Gap Analysis, which finds that existing systems fall short across all critical performance dimensions and need 2–3 orders of magnitude improvement in both scale and quality. The quantities used in that benchmarking include coherence time, two-qubit gate fidelity, effective logical qubit count and computational throughput efficiency. Quality is then folded into capacity: the Effective Qubit Count weights each physical qubit by its validation score and operational availability, and Throughput Efficiency gives the fraction of physical qubits meeting validation standards. They connect to Gap Analysis, Effective Qubit Count, Throughput Efficiency, the Overall Validation Score and the PulseCore Validation Framework.