Quantum computers have the potential to revolutionize diverse fields, including quantum chemistry, materials science, and machine learning. However, contemporary quantum computers experience errors that often cause quantum programs run on them to fail. Until quantum computers can reliably execute large quantum programs, stakeholders will need fast and reliable methods for assessing a quantum computer's capability--i.e., the programs it can run and how well it can run them. Previously, off-the-shelf neural network architectures have been used to model quantum computers' capabilities, but with limited success, because these networks fail to learn the complex quantum physics that determines real quantum computers' errors. We address this shortcoming with a new quantum-physics-aware neural network architecture for learning capability models.

Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) are machine learning tools that approximate the solution of general partial differential equations (PDEs) by adding them in some form as terms of the loss/cost function of a Neural Network. Most pieces of work in the area of PINNs tackle non-linear PDEs. Nevertheless, many interesting problems involving linear PDEs may benefit from PINNs; these include parametric studies, multi-query problems, and parabolic (transient) PDEs. The purpose of this paper is to explore PINNs for linear PDEs whose solutions may present one or more boundary layers. More specifically, we analyze the steady-state reaction-advection-diffusion equation in regimes in which the diffusive coefficient is small in comparison with the reactive or advective coefficients. We show that adding information about these coefficients as predictor variables in a PINN results in better prediction models than in a PINN that only uses spatial information as predictor variables. This finding may be instrumental in multiscale problems where the coefficients of the PDEs present high variability in small spatiotemporal regions of the domain, and therefore PINNs may be employed together with domain decomposition techniques to efficiently approximate the PDEs locally at each partition of the spatiotemporal domain, without resorting to different learned PINN models at each of these partitions.