  Unitary t-designs have a wide variety of applications in quantum information
theory, such as quantum data encryption and randomised benchmarking. However,
experimental realisations of t-designs are subject to noise. Here we
investigate the effect of noise channels on the quality of single-qubit
t-designs. The noise channels we study are bit flips, phase flips, bit and
phase flips, phase damping, amplitude damping, and depolarising noise. We
consider two noise models: the first has noise applied before the t-design
unitary operations, while the second has noise applied after the unitary
operations. We show that the single-qubit 1-design is affected only by
amplitude damping, while numeric results obtained for the 2-, 3-, 4-, and
5-designs suggest that a 2t-design is significantly more sensitive to noise
than a (2t-1)-design and that, with the exception of amplitude damping, a
(2t+1)-design is as sensitive to noise as a 2t-design. Numeric results also
reveal substantial variations in sensitivity to noise throughout the Bloch
sphere. In particular, t-designs appear to be most sensitive to noise when
acting on pure states and least sensitive to noise for the maximally mixed
state. For depolarising noise, we show that our two noise models are
equivalent, and for the other noise channels, numeric results obtained for the
model where noise is applied after the unitaries reflect the transformation of
the noise channel into a depolarising channel, an effect exploited in
randomised benchmarking with 2-designs.
