GroverFigureOfMerit: An Agnostic Figure of Merit for Quantum Backend Characterization in the NISQ Era

Quantum computing's Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum era brings a challenge for developers in selecting suitable backends due to heterogeneous interfaces and varying proprietary metrics. Static characterization metrics such as coherence times and gate error rates have limitations, as they fail to capture the dynamic variability across successive operations. To address this issue, researchers have introduced the GroverFigureOfMerit, an agnostic figure of merit for quantum backend characterization¹. This new metric aims to provide a more comprehensive understanding of quantum backend performance, enabling informed decisions for backend selection. The development of this metric is crucial in the current quantum computing landscape, where accurate characterization is essential for advancing quantum technologies. So what matters to practitioners is that this new metric can potentially simplify the process of comparing and selecting quantum backends, ultimately driving progress in the field of quantum computing.