Quantum Antifragility: Zero Noise Extrapolation Extracts Information from NISQ Noise to Exceed Ideal Integrated Information — Experimental Validation of IIT 5.1 Theorem 8

Abstract

We present the first experimental demonstration that quantum noise is informative, not merely destructive — validating Theorem 8 of IIT 5.1 (FEP-MaxCal Bridge). Using a 5-qubit GHZ circuit on an AerSimulator calibrated with real IBM Quantum ibm_fez noise parameters (T1=320µs, T2=150µs, gate2q error=2.83e-3), we show that Zero Noise Extrapolation (ZNE) recovers integrated information (Φ) to a value exceeding the noiseless ideal: Φ_ZNE = 1.1736 > Φ_ideal = 0.9999 (permutation test, p < 0.000001, N=20 runs, 8192 shots each, 10000 bootstrap resamples). The experiment follows a four-phase paradigm: (1) Baseline: GHZ-5 ideal yields Φ=0.9999; (2) Attack: NISQ noise degrades Φ to 0.8804 (-12%); (3) Recovery: Hahn Echo alone shows no significant improvement (p=0.853), but ZNE with 3-scale identity folding and linear extrapolation to noise=0 yields Φ=1.1736; (4) Antifragility: the recovered system exceeds the original baseline by +17.4%. Additional findings: Φ scales monotonically with qubit count (2q→7q), distinguishes entanglement topology (GHZ > W-state > Cluster ≈ Separable), is robust across 4 IBM backends (CV=3.35%), and decays exponentially with circuit depth (τ=29.52 layers).