Recently researchers demonstrated numerically that QAOA performance varies as a power law in the amount of noise under certain physical noise models.
A team of scientists at NASA Ames Research Center and USRA Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science has provided a deeper analysis of the origin of this behavior.
In particular, they provided an approximate closed form equation for the fidelity and cost in terms of the noise rate, system size, and circuit depth. As an application, they showed these equations accurately model the trade off between larger circuits which attain better cost values, at the expense of greater degradation due to noise.
