Can Quantum Computers Do Nothing?

     Quantum computing platforms are subject to contradictory engineering requirements: qubits must be protected from mutual interactions when idling (‘doing nothing’), and strongly interacting when in operation. If idling qubits are not sufficiently protected, information can ‘leak’ into neighbouring qubits, become non-locally distributed, and ultimately inaccessible. Candidate solutions to this dilemma include patterning-enhanced many-body localization, dynamical decoupling, and active error correction. However, no information-theoretic protocol exists to actually quantify this information loss due to internal dynamics in a similar way to e.g. SPAM errors or dephasing times. In this work, we develop a scalable, flexible, device non-specific protocol for quantifying this bitwise idle information loss based on the exploitation of tools from quantum information theory. We implement this protocol in over 3500 experiments carried out across 4 months (Dec 2023 - Mar 2024) on IBM’s entire Falcon 5.11 series of processors. After accounting for other sources of error, and extrapolating results via a scaling analysis in shot count to zero shot noise, we detect idle information leakage to a high degree of statistical significance. This work thus provides a firm quantitative foundation from which the protection-operation dilemma can be investigated and ultimately resolved.