We study the effects of imperfections on the fidelity of the Toffoli gate recently realized in a circuit QED setup using quantum control methods. The noise is introduced in the interqubits interactions. The coupling constants are no longer fixed; instead, they fluctuate around average values obeying some given probability density functions characterizing the dynamical-imperfection case. We also consider the static-imperfection case in which the values of the coupling constants are not exactly known. We obtain a more robust gate by modifying the quantum optimization problem using a weighted average of the fidelity over an interval of coupling values as the objective functional.
We study the effects of imperfections on the fidelity of the Toffoli gate recently realized in a circuit QED setup using quantum control methods. The noise is introduced in the interqubits interactions. The coupling constants are no longer fixed; instead, they fluctuate around average values obeying some given probability density functions characterizing the dynamical-imperfection case. We also consider the static-imperfection case in which the values of the coupling constants are not exactly known. We obtain a more robust gate by modifying the quantum optimization problem using a weighted average of the fidelity over an interval of coupling values as the objective functional.
We study the realization of a Toffoli gate with superconducting qubits in a circuit-quantum-electrodynamics setup using quantum-control methods. Starting with optimized piecewise-constant control fields acting on all qubits and typical strengths of XY-type coupling between the qubits, we demonstrate that the optimal gate fidelities are affected only slightly by a ``low-pass'' filtering of these fields with the typical cutoff frequencies of microwave driving. Restricting ourselves to the range of control-field amplitudes for which the leakage to the noncomputational states of a physical qubit is heavily suppressed, we theoretically predict that in the absence of decoherence and leakage, within 75 ns a Toffoli gate can be realized with intrinsic fidelities higher than 90 while fidelities above 99 can be reached in about 140 ns.
Entangling gates in superconducting quantum computers suffer from imperfection of control and relaxation of qubits. The Toffoli gate, essential to various quantum algorithms and to certain fast error correction schemes, represents a particular challenge, as it is decomposed into at least six two-qubit gates, whose errors accrue on top of the increased probability of qubit relaxation due to the long gate time. While it is possible to significantly reduce the depth of the Toffoli gate by exploiting three-level, i.e., qutrit states internally, existing methods are susceptible to errors arising from frequency drifts due to charge fluctuation effects in the second excited state of the transmon. In this poster, we propose a novel qutrit-based implementation of the Toffoli gate that is inherently robust against such errors. The method is extensively validated through a pulse-level simulation and experiments performed on IBM Quantum machines. On one device, where the total Toffoli gate time is 2.510μs, we obtained average gate fidelity values of 0.928 ± 0.007 and 0.896 ± 0.036 from multiple measurements performed during the first one and twenty-four hours after calibrations, respectively, where the errors represent the standard deviations of the measurement results.
We analytically investigate the fidelity dynamics of a Jaynes--Cummings qubit coupled to a single-mode cavity in the presence of stochastic fluctuations of the qubit--cavity coupling. Such fluctuations naturally arise in cavity- and circuit-QED platforms due to fabrication imperfections, control-field noise, mechanical vibrations, and environmental disturbances. Since the qubit--cavity coupling governs the rate of coherent energy and information exchange, understanding the effects of its fluctuations is essential for assessing the performance of quantum communication, quantum sensing, and quantum information-processing protocols. We consider both Gaussian white noise and Ornstein--Uhlenbeck noise with finite correlation time as models for the coupling fluctuations. Exploiting the closed dynamics within each excitation manifold, we derive exact analytical expressions for the noise-averaged density matrix and the fidelity relative to the ideal noiseless evolution. We show that the fidelity is determined by a single decoherence factor governed by the integrated noise correlation function, establishing a direct connection between microscopic coupling fluctuations and macroscopic coherence loss. In the white-noise limit, the fidelity decays exponentially, whereas finite noise correlation times produce nonexponential decay and slower coherence loss. We further show that the crossover between Markovian-like and non-Markovian regimes is controlled by the ratio of the noise correlation rate to the coherent coupling strength, and that decoherence increases with photon number because of the enhanced effective qubit--cavity coupling. These results provide a unified analytical framework for quantifying decoherence induced by stochastic coupling fluctuations and for evaluating the robustness of cavity-QED protocols under correlated noise.
External controls are necessary to enact quantum logic operations, and the inevitable control noise will result in gate errors in a realistic quantum circuit. We investigate the robustness of quantum gates to the random noise in an optimal control field, by utilizing properties of the quantum control landscape that relates the physical objective (in the present case, the quantum gate fidelity) to the applied controls. An approximate result obtained for the statistical expectation value of the gate fidelity in the weak noise regime is shown to be in excellent agreement with direct Monte Carlo sampling over noise process realizations for fidelity values relevant for practical quantum information processing. Using this approximate result, we demonstrate that maximizing the robustness to additive/multiplicative white noise is equivalent to minimizing the total control time/fluence. Also, a genetic optimization algorithm is used to identify controls with improved robustness to a colored noise characterized by its autocorrelation function.
We study the implementation of one-, two- and three-qubit quantum gates for interacting qubits using optimal control. Markovian and non-Markovian environments are compared and efficient optimization algorithms utilizing analytic gradient expressions and quasi-Newton updates are given for both cases. The performance of the algorithms is analysed for a large set of problems in terms of the fidelities attained and the observed convergence behaviour. New notions of success rate and success speed are introduced and density plots are utilized to study the effects of key parameters, such as gate operation times, and random variables such as the initial fields required to start the iterative algorithm. Core characteristics of the optimal fields are analysed statistically. Substantial differences between Markovian and non-Markovian environments in terms of the possibilities for control and the control mechanisms are uncovered. In the non-Markovian case, gate fidelities improve substantially when the details of the system bath coupling are taken into account, although imperfections such as field leakage can be a significant problem. In the Markovian case, computation time is saved if the fields are pre-optimized neglecting the environment, while including the latter generally does not significantly improve gate fidelities.
Achieving perfect control over the parameters defining a quantum gate is, in general, a very challenging task, and at the same time, environmental interactions can introduce disturbances to the initial states as well. Here we address the problem of how the imperfections in unitaries and noise present in the input states affect the entanglement-generating power of a given quantum gate -- we refer to it as imperfect (noisy) entangling power. We observe that, when the parameters of a given unitary are chosen randomly from a Gaussian distribution centered around the desired mean, the quenched average entangling power -- averaged across multiple random samplings -- exhibits intriguing behavior like it may increase or show nonmonotonic behavior with the increase of disorder strength for certain classes of diagonal unitary operators. For arbitrary unitary operators, the quenched average power tends to stabilize, showing almost constant behavior with variation in the parameters instead of oscillating. Our observations also reveal that, in the presence of a local noise model, the input states that maximize the entangling power of a given unitary operator differ considerably from the noiseless scenario. Additionally, we report that the rankings among unitary operators according to their entangling power in the noiseless case change depending on the noise model and noise strength.