qiskit-calibration-drift

Calibration parameters from IBM Quantum Heron processors joined to ambient and space-weather conditions at the time of each measurement. Designed for time-series forecasting of qubit drift and for studying environmental coupling to superconducting calibrations.

A GitHub Action (source) polls backend.properties() on every available Heron device every 30 minutes and appends new calibration events keyed on (backend, property, qubit_a, qubit_b, calibrated_time).

Backends

All backends are at IBM's Yorktown Heights, NY facility (lat=41.27, lon=-73.78).

Schema

Property families

Coherence. T1, T2 per qubit, in microseconds.

Single-qubit gate errors. sx_error, x_error, id_error, rx_error, rz_error. Reported separately by the IBM API; on a given measurement the four basis gates of the same qubit are typically bit-identical because IBM derives them from one calibration.

Slow single-qubit gate. xslow_error and its _length, on ibm_fez and ibm_kingston.

Two-qubit gates. cz_error (controlled-Z) and rzz_error (parametric ZZ rotation), stored once per ordered directional pair (qubit_a, qubit_b). For an undirected pair {a, b} both (a, b) and (b, a) rows appear and carry different values.

Readout. readout_error, prob_meas0_prep1, prob_meas1_prep0, readout_length, measure_gate_error, measure_gate_length. Readout-error values are quantized to multiples of 1/8192. measure_2_error is an alternative readout scheme present on ibm_kingston only.

Durations. sx_length, x_length, id_length, rx_length, rz_length, cz_length, rzz_length, readout_length, reset_length, measure_length. Mostly constant during the observation window.

Working with the data

from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("phanerozoic/qiskit-calibration-drift", split="train")

For drift analysis, filter to is_new_measurement == True to drop heartbeat replicas. For honest aggregations, also exclude rows where is_failure_ceiling == True. Property families are calibrated on independent schedules — cz_error and the single-qubit basis gates cycle together on a chip-wide cadence (look for chipwide_recal_event_id), readout_error refreshes more often, T1 / T2 less often, so the calibrated_time for two different families on the same qubit will generally not coincide.

Sources

• Calibration data: IBM Quantum backend.properties() via Qiskit Runtime.
• Kp (definitive), ap, Ap, F10.7, SN: GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences (Matzka et al. 2021, Space Weather, doi:10.1029/2020SW002641); SN from WDC-SILSO, Royal Observatory of Belgium.
• Kp (realtime fallback), Bz, Dst, 10cm flux summary: NOAA SWPC.
• Solar wind Bz: DSCOVR L2 magnetometer.
• Cosmic-ray neutron monitor: NMDB Newark station.
• Ambient weather: api.weather.gov (KHPN, Westchester County).

License

CC-BY-4.0, except for the Sunspot Number column (SN) which is CC-BY-NC-4.0 per WDC-SILSO licensing.