`pause` statement

[jon-wurtz]

One of the use cases of our near-term hardware is to explore noise. This means that programmers should have the ability to add extra noise in various ways. Some are technically already present-- such as zero noise extrapolation by injecting coherent noise using an ensemble of circuits-- but a few others are not. Shoutout to Yuval for the idea.

One useful statement would be a pause, which tells the hardware to do "nothing" for some time, simply to accumulate errors. A user might then scan over the length of those pause times or even do other fancy things (like dynamical decoupling or echoes).

A prototype signature of the statement might be

def pause(time:float):...

where time is a unitless value related to the effective clock speed of the device; time=1.0 corresponds to the time of a single median-length move.

[weinbe58]

This seems like a shuttle statement rather than a circuit statement.

[cduck]

Yes, but I think Jonathan is considering the use case of users who only want to write a circuit but want to annotate some of the desired timing or structure of the compiled program to influence error rates.