Wigner's Friend as a Circuit — Inter-Branch Communication Witness Benchmarks (Reproducibility Bundle)

GitHub Release Notes — wigner-friend-v2b

Release tag: wigner-friend-v2b
Date: 2026-01-21
Repository: christopher-altman/ibm-qml-kernel

What this release is

This release snapshots the exact reproducibility bundle used for the arXiv submission:

“Wigner's Friend as a Circuit: Inter-Branch Communication Witness Benchmarks on Superconducting Quantum Hardware.”

It is intended to be a stable, citeable checkpoint for referees and readers.

Highlights

• Hardware execution on IBM Quantum ibm_fez with N = 20,000 shots
• Coherence-sensitive witness evaluation (X and Y bases) + visibility baseline
• Backend-matched noisy simulations using calibration-synchronized noise models
• Deterministic figure regeneration from archived artifacts

Reproducibility bundle contents (expected)

• Execution provenance: IBM Quantum job IDs + backend calibration snapshots
• Analysis pipeline: scripts/modules to reproduce values and plots
• Artifacts: generated plots and intermediate data needed for regeneration
• Manifest: SHA256 hashes for all bundle files (tamper-evident)

Quickstart (paper-aligned)

# Verify IBM Quantum connectivity
python -c "from qiskit_ibm_runtime import QiskitRuntimeService as S; s=S(); bs=s.backends(simulator=False, operational=True); print('n_backends=', len(bs))"

# Hardware coherence witness (X + Y bases)
python -m experiments.branch_transfer.run_ibm   --backend ibm_fez --mode coherence_witness   --include-y-basis --shots 20000 --optimization-level 2

# Hardware visibility (rp_z mode)
python -m experiments.branch_transfer.run_ibm   --backend ibm_fez --mode rp_z --mu 1   --shots 20000 --optimization-level 2

# Backend-matched noisy simulations
python -m experiments.branch_transfer.run_sim   --mode coherence_witness --include-y-basis --mu 1   --shots 20000 --noise-from-backend ibm_fez

python -m experiments.branch_transfer.run_sim   --mode rp_z --mu 1 --shots 20000   --noise-from-backend ibm_fez

# Generate analysis figures
python -m experiments.branch_transfer.analyze   --artifacts-dir artifacts/branch_transfer   --figures-dir artifacts/branch_transfer/figures --plot-all

Suggested citation

• Paper: arXiv
• Code + bundle: cite this release tag wigner-friend-v2b (and Zenodo DOI)

Notes

• If you see smart quotes in any copied snippets, retype straight ASCII quotes. In PDFs they sometimes appear typographically transformed.