Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

arXiv:0811.2174 · Physical Review B

Optimized single-qubit gates for Josephson phase qubits

Shabnam Safaei, Simone Montangero, Fabio Taddei, Rosario Fazio

Published Feb 25, 2009• 37 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

In a Josephson phase qubit, the coherent manipulations of the computational states are achieved by modulating an applied ac current, typically in the microwave range. In this work, we show that it is possible to find optimal modulations of the bias current to achieve high-fidelity gates. We apply quantum optimal control theory to determine the form of the pulses and study in details the case of a NOT gate. To test the efficiency of the optimized pulses in an experimental setup, we also address the effect of possible imperfections in the pulses shapes, the role of off-resonance elements in the Hamiltonian, and the effect of capacitive interaction with a second qubit.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.79.064524

Related papers

Efficient one- and two-qubit pulsed gates for an oscillator-stabilized Josephson qubit

Frederico Brito, David Peter Divincenzo, R. H. Koch +1 more

We present theoretical schemes for performing high-fidelity one- and two-qubit pulsed gates for a superconducting flux qubit. The 'IBM qubit' consists of three Josephson junctions, three loops and a superconducting transmission line. Assuming a fixed inductive qubit–qubit coupling, we show that the effective qubit–qubit interaction is tunable by changing the applied fluxes, and can be made negligible, allowing one to perform high-fidelity single qubit gates. Our schemes are tailored to alleviate errors due to 1/ f noise; we find gates with only 1% loss of fidelity due to this source, for pulse times in the range of 20–30 ns for one-qubit gates ( Z rotations, Hadamard) and 60 ns for a two-qubit gate (controlled- Z ). Our relaxation and dephasing time estimates indicate a comparable loss of fidelity from this source. The control of leakage plays an important role in the design of our shaped pulses, preventing shorter pulse times. However, we have found that imprecision in the control of the quantum phase plays a major role in the limitation of the fidelity of our gates.

arXiv:0709.1478•New Journal of Physics•Mar 18, 2008•24 citations

Methods and Results for Quantum Optimal Pulse Control on Superconducting Qubit Systems

Elisha S. Matekole, Yao-Lung Leo Fang, Meifeng Lin

The effective use of current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices is often limited by the noise which is caused by interaction with the environment and affects the fidelity of quantum gates. In transmon qubit systems, the quantum gate fidelity can be improved by applying control pulses that can minimize the effects of the environmental noise. In this work, we employ physics-guided quantum optimal control strategies to design optimal pulses driving quantum gates on superconducting qubit systems. We test our results by conducting experiments on the IBM quantum hardware using their OpenPulse API. We compare the performance of our pulse-optimized quantum gates against the default quantum gates and show that the optimized pulses improve the fidelity of the quantum gates, in particular the single-qubit gates. We discuss the challenges we encountered in our work and point to possible future improvements.

arXiv:2202.03260•IEEE International Symposium on Parallel & Distributed Processing, Workshops and Phd Forum•May 1, 2022•6 citations

Optimal Quantum Driving for Single-Qubit Gates

Joni Ikonen

Quantum computers store and manipulate information in individual quantized energy levels. These devices, not yet realized in their full potential, have the ability to perform certain computational tasks more efficiently than any classical computer. One possible way to implement a quantum computer is to use superconducting circuits controlled by single-mode electromagnetic fields. These circuits constitute the physical quantum bits, or qubits, that are used to store quantum information. A complete, fault-tolerant quantum computer potentially consists of at least millions of physical qubits which are grouped to form fault-tolerant logical qubits. Controlling each physical qubit individually requires a great amount of energy, and hence a future challenge is to reduce the energy consumption in qubit control while maintaining the high precision. In this thesis, we derive a fundamental upper bound for the gate fidelity of a single-qubit not gate implemented with a single resonant driving pulse. It is shown that the upper bound approaches unity inversely proportionally to the increasing mean photon number of the pulse. Furthermore, we find that the upper bound is achieved with an optimal superposition of squeezed states. The typically employed coherent state produces twice as high gate error as the corresponding optimal state. In addition, we present and numerically study a correction protocol that allows using the same drive state for multiple qubit operations. This sustained state is refreshed by sequentially coupling ancillary qubits to it, effectively resetting it and removing entanglement with the previously operated qubits. Thus our protocol allows using the same drive state to implement not gates for different qubits indefinitely, and hence provides a possible route to energy-efficient large-scale quantum computing.

Työväentutkimus Vuosikirja•Jan 1, 2016•0 citations

Theory of Superconducting Phase Qubits

Frederick W. Strauch

The theory of superconducting phase qubits---also known as current-biased Josephson junctions---is presented. In the first part of this thesis, I introduce quantum computation, quantum simulation, and their deep connection with symplectic integration. I then consider the fundamental many-body theory of superconductivity and Josephson junctions and show how the quantum dynamics of a single macroscopic degree of freedom, the gauge invariant phase difference, emerges. A complete study of the Hilbert space structure of such a variable is performed for the current-biased junction. The resulting resonance structure is studied in detail, using various formalisms including the WKB approximation, instanton methods, the complex scaling transformation, basis set stabilization, numerical integration, and dynamical simulation using Lie algebraic wave-packet propagation. The second part of this thesis explores how the current-biased junction can be used as an element of a quantum computer---a quantum bit (qubit). Single qubit operations are studied, followed by the presentation of the theory of coupled qubit devices. My key result is the design and optimization of quantum logic gates with high fidelity (F ~ 0.9999) for capacitively coupled phase qubits with short gate times (~ 10 ns). Finally, I examine an advanced qubit-coupling scheme, a resonant coupling method utilizing a harmonic oscillator as the auxiliary degree of freedom. The models and methods presented here have been developed in direct collaboration with an experimental program. These experiments are the first to show spectroscopic evidence for entanglement between two and three macroscopic degrees of freedom in a superconducting circuit.

•Nov 24, 2004•6 citations

Optimal control for fast and high-fidelity quantum gates in coupled superconducting flux qubits

Shang‐Yu Huang, Hsi‐Sheng Goan

We apply the quantum optimal control theory based on the Krotov method to implement single-qubit $X$ and $Z$ gates and two-qubit cnot gates for inductively coupled superconducting flux qubits with fixed qubit transition frequencies and fixed off-diagonal qubit-qubit coupling. Our scheme shares an advantage with other direct-coupling schemes in that it requires no additional coupler subcircuit and control lines. The control lines needed are only for the manipulation of individual qubits (e.g., a time-dependent magnetic flux or field applied on each qubit). The qubits are operated at the optimal coherence points and the gate operation times (less than 1 ns for single-qubit gates and $\ensuremath{\sim}2$ ns for cnotgates) are much shorter than the corresponding qubit decoherence time. A cnot gate or other general quantum gates can be implemented in a single run of the pulse sequence rather than being decomposed into several single-qubit and several entangled two-qubit operations in series by composite pulse sequences. Quantum gates constructed via our scheme are all with very high fidelity (very low error) as our optimal control scheme takes into account the fixed qubit detuning and fixed two-qubit interaction as well as all other time-dependent magnetic-field-induced single-qubit interactions and two-qubit couplings. The effect of leakage to higher-energy-level states and the effect of qubit decoherence on the quantum-gate operations are also discussed.

arXiv:1406.7707•Physical Review A•Jul 14, 2014•30 citations

Optimization of High-Fidelity Single-Qubit Gates for Fluxoniums Using Single-Flux Quantum Control

Maxime Lapointe-Major, Boyan Torosov, Bohdan Kulchytskyy +1 more

We present a gradient-based method to construct memory-efficient, high-fidelity, single-qubit gates for fluxonium qubits. These gates are constructed using a sequence of single-flux quantum (SFQ) pulses that are sent to the qubit through either capacitive or inductive coupling. The schedule of SFQ pulses is constructed with an on-ramp and an off-ramp applied prior to and after a pulse train, where the pulses are spaced at intervals equal to the qubit period. We reduce the optimization problem to the scheduling of a fixed number of SFQ pulses in the on-ramp and solve it by relaxing the discretization constraint of the SFQ clock as an intermediate step, allowing the use of the Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno optimizer. Using this approach, gate fidelities of 99.99 % can be achieved for inductive coupling and 99.9 % for capacitive coupling, with leakage being the main source of coherent errors for both approaches.

quant-pharXiv:2511.14746•Nov 19, 2025•0 citations
In a Josephson phase qubit, the coherent manipulations of the computational states are achieved by modulating an applied ac current, typically in the microwave range. In this work, we show that it is possible to find optimal modulations of the bias current to achieve high-fidelity gates. We apply quantum optimal control theory to determine the form of the pulses and study in details the case of a NOT gate. To test the efficiency of the optimized pulses in an experimental setup, we also address the effect of possible imperfections in the pulses shapes, the role of off-resonance elements in the Hamiltonian, and the effect of capacitive interaction with a second qubit.
We present theoretical schemes for performing high-fidelity one- and two-qubit pulsed gates for a superconducting flux qubit. The 'IBM qubit' consists of three Josephson junctions, three loops and a superconducting transmission line. Assuming a fixed inductive qubit–qubit coupling, we show that the effective qubit–qubit interaction is tunable by changing the applied fluxes, and can be made negligible, allowing one to perform high-fidelity single qubit gates. Our schemes are tailored to alleviate errors due to 1/ f noise; we find gates with only 1% loss of fidelity due to this source, for pulse times in the range of 20–30 ns for one-qubit gates ( Z rotations, Hadamard) and 60 ns for a two-qubit gate (controlled- Z ). Our relaxation and dephasing time estimates indicate a comparable loss of fidelity from this source. The control of leakage plays an important role in the design of our shaped pulses, preventing shorter pulse times. However, we have found that imprecision in the control of the quantum phase plays a major role in the limitation of the fidelity of our gates.
The effective use of current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices is often limited by the noise which is caused by interaction with the environment and affects the fidelity of quantum gates. In transmon qubit systems, the quantum gate fidelity can be improved by applying control pulses that can minimize the effects of the environmental noise. In this work, we employ physics-guided quantum optimal control strategies to design optimal pulses driving quantum gates on superconducting qubit systems. We test our results by conducting experiments on the IBM quantum hardware using their OpenPulse API. We compare the performance of our pulse-optimized quantum gates against the default quantum gates and show that the optimized pulses improve the fidelity of the quantum gates, in particular the single-qubit gates. We discuss the challenges we encountered in our work and point to possible future improvements.
Quantum computers store and manipulate information in individual quantized energy levels. These devices, not yet realized in their full potential, have the ability to perform certain computational tasks more efficiently than any classical computer. One possible way to implement a quantum computer is to use superconducting circuits controlled by single-mode electromagnetic fields. These circuits constitute the physical quantum bits, or qubits, that are used to store quantum information. A complete, fault-tolerant quantum computer potentially consists of at least millions of physical qubits which are grouped to form fault-tolerant logical qubits. Controlling each physical qubit individually requires a great amount of energy, and hence a future challenge is to reduce the energy consumption in qubit control while maintaining the high precision. In this thesis, we derive a fundamental upper bound for the gate fidelity of a single-qubit not gate implemented with a single resonant driving pulse. It is shown that the upper bound approaches unity inversely proportionally to the increasing mean photon number of the pulse. Furthermore, we find that the upper bound is achieved with an optimal superposition of squeezed states. The typically employed coherent state produces twice as high gate error as the corresponding optimal state. In addition, we present and numerically study a correction protocol that allows using the same drive state for multiple qubit operations. This sustained state is refreshed by sequentially coupling ancillary qubits to it, effectively resetting it and removing entanglement with the previously operated qubits. Thus our protocol allows using the same drive state to implement not gates for different qubits indefinitely, and hence provides a possible route to energy-efficient large-scale quantum computing.
The theory of superconducting phase qubits---also known as current-biased Josephson junctions---is presented. In the first part of this thesis, I introduce quantum computation, quantum simulation, and their deep connection with symplectic integration. I then consider the fundamental many-body theory of superconductivity and Josephson junctions and show how the quantum dynamics of a single macroscopic degree of freedom, the gauge invariant phase difference, emerges. A complete study of the Hilbert space structure of such a variable is performed for the current-biased junction. The resulting resonance structure is studied in detail, using various formalisms including the WKB approximation, instanton methods, the complex scaling transformation, basis set stabilization, numerical integration, and dynamical simulation using Lie algebraic wave-packet propagation. The second part of this thesis explores how the current-biased junction can be used as an element of a quantum computer---a quantum bit (qubit). Single qubit operations are studied, followed by the presentation of the theory of coupled qubit devices. My key result is the design and optimization of quantum logic gates with high fidelity (F ~ 0.9999) for capacitively coupled phase qubits with short gate times (~ 10 ns). Finally, I examine an advanced qubit-coupling scheme, a resonant coupling method utilizing a harmonic oscillator as the auxiliary degree of freedom. The models and methods presented here have been developed in direct collaboration with an experimental program. These experiments are the first to show spectroscopic evidence for entanglement between two and three macroscopic degrees of freedom in a superconducting circuit.
We apply the quantum optimal control theory based on the Krotov method to implement single-qubit XXX and ZZZ gates and two-qubit cnot gates for inductively coupled superconducting flux qubits with fixed qubit transition frequencies and fixed off-diagonal qubit-qubit coupling. Our scheme shares an advantage with other direct-coupling schemes in that it requires no additional coupler subcircuit and control lines. The control lines needed are only for the manipulation of individual qubits (e.g., a time-dependent magnetic flux or field applied on each qubit). The qubits are operated at the optimal coherence points and the gate operation times (less than 1 ns for single-qubit gates and $\ensuremath{\sim}2$ ns for cnotgates) are much shorter than the corresponding qubit decoherence time. A cnot gate or other general quantum gates can be implemented in a single run of the pulse sequence rather than being decomposed into several single-qubit and several entangled two-qubit operations in series by composite pulse sequences. Quantum gates constructed via our scheme are all with very high fidelity (very low error) as our optimal control scheme takes into account the fixed qubit detuning and fixed two-qubit interaction as well as all other time-dependent magnetic-field-induced single-qubit interactions and two-qubit couplings. The effect of leakage to higher-energy-level states and the effect of qubit decoherence on the quantum-gate operations are also discussed.
We present a gradient-based method to construct memory-efficient, high-fidelity, single-qubit gates for fluxonium qubits. These gates are constructed using a sequence of single-flux quantum (SFQ) pulses that are sent to the qubit through either capacitive or inductive coupling. The schedule of SFQ pulses is constructed with an on-ramp and an off-ramp applied prior to and after a pulse train, where the pulses are spaced at intervals equal to the qubit period. We reduce the optimization problem to the scheduling of a fixed number of SFQ pulses in the on-ramp and solve it by relaxing the discretization constraint of the SFQ clock as an intermediate step, allowing the use of the Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno optimizer. Using this approach, gate fidelities of 99.99 % can be achieved for inductive coupling and 99.9 % for capacitive coupling, with leakage being the main source of coherent errors for both approaches.