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arXiv:1902.08056 · Scientific Reports

Minimal time robust control for two superconducting qubits

Niril George, Joseph L. Allen, Robert L. Kosut, Eran Ginossar

Published Dec 24, 2025• 5 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

High-fidelity quantum gates are crucial for achieving fault-tolerant quantum computing; however, decoherence significantly reduces gate fidelities during long operation times. Although optimal control techniques can theoretically minimize these operation times, they often neglect realistic uncertainties in system parameters. In this work, we demonstrate that by using robust optimal control strategies, the cross-resonance gate in superconducting systems can be operated within 64 ns, achieving fidelities of [Formula: see text] while maintaining robustness against up to 10% uncertainty in a single parameter. Alternatively, by extending the control time to 71 ns, we achieve fidelities of [Formula: see text] with robustness against up to 3% uncertainty. Our results identify the minimal control times attainable with experimentally feasible pulses and system parameters, as well as the maximum allowable static parameter error for high-fidelity operations. Furthermore, we demonstrate simultaneous robustness against both static and time-dependent errors by generating 100 ns control pulses ([Formula: see text]) that maintain robustness against 10% static parameter error and time-dependent parameter fluctuations two orders of magnitude stronger than typical experimental noise. These findings demonstrate a viable open-loop strategy for implementing fast, high-fidelity quantum gates in the presence of realistic system uncertainties that would otherwise degrade conventional control pulses.

DOI
10.1038/s41598-025-32747-8

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High-fidelity quantum gates are crucial for achieving fault-tolerant quantum computing; however, decoherence significantly reduces gate fidelities during long operation times. Although optimal control techniques can theoretically minimize these operation times, they often neglect realistic uncertainties in system parameters. In this work, we demonstrate that by using robust optimal control strategies, the cross-resonance gate in superconducting systems can be operated within 64 ns, achieving fidelities of [Formula: see text] while maintaining robustness against up to 10% uncertainty in a single parameter. Alternatively, by extending the control time to 71 ns, we achieve fidelities of [Formula: see text] with robustness against up to 3% uncertainty. Our results identify the minimal control times attainable with experimentally feasible pulses and system parameters, as well as the maximum allowable static parameter error for high-fidelity operations. Furthermore, we demonstrate simultaneous robustness against both static and time-dependent errors by generating 100 ns control pulses ([Formula: see text]) that maintain robustness against 10% static parameter error and time-dependent parameter fluctuations two orders of magnitude stronger than typical experimental noise. These findings demonstrate a viable open-loop strategy for implementing fast, high-fidelity quantum gates in the presence of realistic system uncertainties that would otherwise degrade conventional control pulses.
Fault-tolerant quantum computing requires high-fidelity quantum gates that are resilient to control errors and device imperfections. Here, we develop energy-optimal control pulses for single-qubit gates that are simultaneously robust against frequency detuning and waveform inhomogeneities while also suppressing leakage outside the computational subspace. Combining the optimized pulse envelopes with an adaptive control scheme, we experimentally demonstrate optimal robust gates on a superconducting quantum processor. For a gate duration of 90ns, we achieve fidelities above 99.9% for the X gate and 99.6% for Hadamard-type gates. For the X gate, we maintain fidelities above 99.5% for simultaneous drive-amplitude variations up to 20% and qubit detuning up to 4 MHz. This robustness outperforms that of conventional Gaussian pulses by an order of magnitude, without much difference in peak gate fidelity. These results establish a route towards robust single-qubit control in large-scale quantum processors, advancing the development of fault-tolerant quantum computing.
Superconducting circuits are one of the leading architectures in quantum computing. To undertake quantum computing one must be able to perform quantum gates; however, two-qubit gates are still limited in fidelity and gate time. The cross-resonance gate is a two-qubit gate that uses direct microwave drives and has seen much success in its implementation; but, there are theoretical indications that it has not yet reached the coherence limited fidelity value and its gate time is still relatively long compared with other quantum gate methods. Quantum optimal control theory is a powerful tool in the design of controls for quantum operations and has shown the capability to improve gate fidelities and reduce gate times. Robust quantum optimal control methodologies have further built on this to develop high fidelity quantum gates that are robust to uncertainties and noise in the system. In this thesis we use robust quantum optimal control theory to achieve these goals for the cross-resonance gate in a variety of superconducting qubit architectures. First, we investigate two superconducting qubits embedded in a common 3D microwave cavity in which the control drive is implemented via the common cavity mode of the cavity. We determine pulse shapes that implement the cross-resonance gate that are robust to uncertainty in the qubit transition frequencies for both a strictly two-level superconducting qubit and a three-level qubit. Second, we look at the cross-resonance gate with direct drives on each qubit, finding the minimal time to perform the cross-resonance gate with pulses that are robust to uncertainty in a measured system parameter for three cases: two three-level qubits with no drive crosstalk, two three-level qubits with some drive crosstalk, and two two-level qubits. Lastly, we report on simulations undertaken towards implementing a robust, high fidelity cross-resonance gate in a novel superconducting quantum device known as the coaxmon.
Fault-tolerant quantum computing requires quantum gates that combine short duration, high fidelity, and robustness to noise. As quantum processors scale, robustness becomes increasingly important because exhaustive characterization and frequent recalibration of individual gates become impractical. We present a comprehensive optimal-control framework for controlled-Z (CZ) gates between directly coupled, frequency-tunable transmons that systematically accounts for intrinsic Hamiltonian errors and realistic decoherence mechanisms, including energy relaxation and dephasing. Using smooth, single-shot flux pulses, we obtain 12-ns CZ gates---close to the theoretical speed limit of 11.6 ns---with intrinsic errors suppressed to the 2×10−52\times10^{-5}2×10−5 level. We construct dephasing noise models, calibrated against published experimental measurements, that capture fast dephasing from room-temperature control electronics and slow dephasing from 1/f1/f1/f flux noise. Using these models, we identify dephasing sweet spots that suppress sensitivity to dephasing noise. We further exploit transmon asymmetry as a design parameter to access distinct noise-resilient operating regimes. These results establish an experimentally applicable framework for balancing gate speed, fidelity, and noise robustness while reducing characterization and recalibration overhead.
In the companion paper (Part I), we developed an optimal-control framework to suppress intrinsic and decoherence-induced errors in controlled-Z (CZ) gates between directly coupled, frequency-tunable transmons. Here, we extend this framework to incorporate uncertainties in coupling strength, anharmonicities, and zero-flux qubit frequencies, enabling the design of high-fidelity gates robust against noise and parameter uncertainties. We classify these uncertainties by whether they perturb the off-diagonal coupling strengths or the diagonal detunings of the Hamiltonian, and we identify distinct suppression mechanisms for each class. Coupling errors are mitigated through dynamical decoupling induced by strong detuning modulation. For a 30-ns gate, this strategy reduces the coupling error to 6.21×10−76.21\times10^{-7}6.21×10−7 and tolerates coupling-strength uncertainties up to 2π×42π\times42π×4 MHz while keeping total gate infidelity below 10−310^{-3}10−3. Detuning errors are minimized near a symmetric-detuning operating point that balances the two dominant leakage-mediated interactions. A 24-ns gate operated near this point tolerates individual uncertainties of up to 2π×52π\times52π×5 MHz in each relevant diagonal parameter under the same infidelity threshold. We further optimize gate performance under realistic conditions where intrinsic errors, decoherence, and parameter uncertainties coexist across six representative stages of progressively improving hardware performance. The resulting stage-specific controls achieve lower infidelity and greater robustness. Together with the companion study (Part I), this framework offers a practical approach to balance speed, fidelity, and robustness while reducing the need for exhaustive characterization and frequent recalibration in large-scale superconducting quantum processors.
Achieving fast and high-fidelity qubit operations is crucial for unlocking the potential of quantum computers. In particular, reaching low gate errors in two-qubit gates has been a long-standing challenge in the field of superconducting qubits due to their typically long duration relative to coherence times. To realize fast gates, we use the hybridization between fixed-frequency superconducting qubits with a strongly interacting coupler mode that is tunable in frequency. To reduce population leakage during required adiabatic passages through avoided level crossings, we employ a sensitivity-adaptive closed-loop optimization method to design complex pulse shapes. We compare the performance of Gaussian-square, Fourier-series, and piecewise-constant-slope pulse parametrizations and are able to reach 99.9% controlled- Z -gate fidelity using a 64-ns-long Fourier-series pulse defined by only seven parameters. These high-fidelity values are achieved by analyzing the optimized pulse shapes to identify and systematically mitigate signal-line distortions in the experiment. To improve the convergence speed of the optimization, we implement an adaptive cost function, which continuously maximizes the sensitivity. The demonstrated method can be used for tune-up and recalibration of superconducting quantum processors.
Constructing high-fidelity control fields that are robust to control, system, and/or surrounding environment uncertainties is a crucial objective for quantum information processing. Using the two-state Landau-Zener model for illustrative simulations of a controlled qubit, we generate optimal controls for $\ensuremath{\pi}/2$ and $\ensuremath{\pi}$ pulses and investigate their inherent robustness to uncertainty in the magnitude of the drift Hamiltonian. Next, we construct a quantum-control protocol to improve system-drift robustness by combining environment-decoupling pulse criteria and optimal control theory for unitary operations. By perturbatively expanding the unitary time-evolution operator for an open quantum system, previous analysis of environment-decoupling control pulses has calculated explicit control-field criteria to suppress environment-induced errors up to (but not including) third order from $\ensuremath{\pi}/2$ and $\ensuremath{\pi}$ pulses. We systematically integrate this criteria with optimal control theory, incorporating an estimate of the uncertain parameter to produce improvements in gate fidelity and robustness, demonstrated via a numerical example based on double quantum dot qubits. For the qubit model used in this work, postfacto analysis of the resulting controls suggests that realistic control-field fluctuations and noise may contribute just as significantly to gate errors as system and environment fluctuations.