We develop an error mitigation method for the control-free phase estimation. We prove a theorem that under the first-order correction, the phases of a unitary operator are immune to the noise channels with only Hermitian Kraus operators, and therefore, certain benign types of noise for phase estimation are identified. By further incorporating the randomized compiling protocol, we can convert the generic noise in the phase estimation circuits into stochastic Pauli noise, which satisfies the condition of our theorem. Thus, we achieve a noise-resilient phase estimation without any quantum resource overhead. The simulated experiments show that our method can significantly reduce the estimation error of the phases by up to 2 orders of magnitude. Our method paves the way for the utilization of quantum phase estimation before the advent of fault-tolerant quantum computers.

• Received 11 August 2022
• Accepted 1 June 2023

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.250601