We describe an efficient and scalable framework for modeling crosstalk effects on quantum information processors. By applying optimal control techniques, we show how to tune-up arbitrary high-fidelity parallel operations on systems with substantial local and nonlocal crosstalk. As an example, we simulate a 2D square array of 100 superconducting transmon qubits. These results suggest that rather than striving to engineer away undesirable interactions during fabrication, we can largely mitigate such effects with software through careful characterization and control optimization.
We describe an efficient and scalable framework for modeling crosstalk effects on quantum information processors. By applying optimal control techniques, we show how to tune-up arbitrary high-fidelity parallel operations on systems with substantial local and nonlocal crosstalk. As an example, we simulate a 2D square array of 100 superconducting transmon qubits. These results suggest that rather than striving to engineer away undesirable interactions during fabrication, we can largely mitigate such effects with software through careful characterization and control optimization.
Crosstalk between qubits fundamentally limits the scalability of quantum processors, necessitating physics-based models that can handle the complexity of large qubit arrays. Here, we develop a comprehensive theoretical and experimental framework that captures residual interactions between both adjacent and non-adjacent qubits in fixed-frequency transmon lattices. The model integrates the combined effects of exponential localization in banded capacitance matrices, suppression of virtual couplings through detuning products across intermediate modes, and evanescent decay of below-cutoff electromagnetic fields, yielding predictive scaling relations for coupling strength as a function of spatial separation and spectral detuning. Experimental characterization of a 4×4 superconducting-qubit lattice with inductive shunt pillars reveals exponential spatial decay and frequency-dependent suppression consistent with theoretical predictions, achieving quantitative agreement for all nearest-neighbor couplings across the \qtyrange[range-phrase = --, range-units = single]{4}{6}{\giga\hertz} operating range. Our results show that standard dispersive Hamiltonian approximations systematically overestimate long-range coupling when spatial and spectral dependencies are neglected; these errors propagate into circuit simulation and design strategies. Our framework provides design guidance for crosstalk mitigation in larger-scale quantum processors under realistic fabrication constraints, addressing a bottleneck in scalability.
Accurate and efficient implementation of parallel quantum gates is crucial for scalable quantum information processing. However, the unavoidable crosstalk between qubits in current noisy processors impedes the achievement of high gate fidelities and renders full Hilbert-space control optimization prohibitively difficult. Here, we overcome this challenge by reducing the full-system optimization to crosstalk-robust control over constant-sized subsystems, which dramatically reduces the computational cost. Our method effectively eliminates the leading-order gate operation deviations induced by crosstalk, thereby suppressing error rates. Within this framework, we construct analytical pulse solutions for parallel single-qubit gates and numerical pulses for parallel multi-qubit operations. We validate the proposed approach numerically across multiple platforms, including coupled nitrogen-vacancy centers, a nuclear-spin processor, and superconducting-qubit arrays with up to 200 qubits. As a result, the noise scaling is reduced from exponential to linear for parallel single-qubit gates, and an order-of-magnitude reduction is achieved for parallel multi-qubit gates. Moreover, our method does not require precise knowledge of crosstalk strengths and makes no assumption about the underlying qubit connectivity or lattice geometry, thereby establishing a scalable framework for parallel quantum control in large-scale quantum architectures.
Maintaining or even improving gate performance with growing numbers of parallel controlled qubits is a vital requirement for fault-tolerant quantum computing.For superconducting quantum processors, though isolated one-or two-qubit gates have been demonstrated with high fidelity, implementing these gates in parallel commonly shows worse performance.Generally, this degradation is attributed to various crosstalks between qubits, such as quantum crosstalk due to residual inter-qubit coupling.An understanding of the exact nature of these crosstalks is critical to figuring out respective mitigation schemes and improved qubit architecture designs with low crosstalk.Here we give a theoretical analysis of quantum crosstalk impact on simultaneous gate operations in a qubit architecture, where fixed-frequency transmon qubits are coupled via a tunable bus, and sub-100-ns controlled-Z (CZ) gates can be realized by applying a baseband flux pulse on the bus.Our analysis shows that for microwave-driven single-qubit gates, the dressing from the qubit-qubit coupling can cause non-negligible cross-driving errors when qubits operate near frequency collision regions.During CZ gate operations, although unwanted nearest-neighbor interactions are nominally turned off, sub-MHz parasitic next-nearest-neighbor interactions involving spectator qubits can still exist, causing considerable leakage or control error when one operates qubit systems around these parasitic resonance points.To ensure high-fidelity simultaneous operations, a request could be raised to figure out a better way to balance the gate error from target qubit systems themselves and the error from nonparticipating spectator qubits.Overall, our analysis suggests that towards useful quantum processors, the qubit architecture should be examined carefully in the context of high-fidelity simultaneous gate operations in a scalable qubit lattice.
One of the key challenges in current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers is to control a quantum system with high-fidelity quantum gates. There are many reasons a quantum gate can go wrong - for superconducting transmon qubits in particular, one major source of gate error is the unwanted crosstalk between neighboring qubits due to a phenomenon called frequency crowding. We motivate a systematic approach for understanding and mitigating the crosstalk noise when executing near-term quantum programs on superconducting NISQ computers. We present a general software solution to alleviate frequency crowding by systematically tuning qubit frequencies according to input programs, trading parallelism for higher gate fidelity when necessary. The net result is that our work dramatically improves the crosstalk resilience of tunable-qubit, fixed-coupler hardware, matching or surpassing other more complex architectural designs such as tunable-coupler systems. On NISQ benchmarks, we improve worst-case program success rate by 13.3x on average, compared to existing traditional serialization strategies.
Single-qubit gates on superconducting quantum processors are typically implemented using microwave pulses applied through dedicated control lines. However, these microwave pulses may also drive other qubits due to crosstalk arising from capacitive coupling and wavefunction overlap in systems with closely spaced transition frequencies. Crosstalk and frequency crowding increase errors during simultaneous single-qubit operations relative to isolated gates, thus forming a major bottleneck for scaling superconducting quantum processors. In this work, we combine model-based qubit frequency optimization with pulse shaping to demonstrate crosstalk error mitigation in single-qubit gates on a 49-qubit superconducting quantum processor. We introduce and experimentally verify an analytical model of simultaneous single-qubit gate error caused by microwave crosstalk that depends on a given pulse shape. By employing a model-based optimization strategy of qubit frequencies, we minimize the crosstalk-induced error across the processor and achieve a mean simultaneous single-qubit gate fidelity of 99.96% for a 16-ns gate duration, approaching the mean individual gate fidelity. To further reduce the simultaneous error and required qubit frequency bandwidth on high-crosstalk qubit pairs, we introduce a crosstalk transition suppression (CTS) pulse shaping technique that minimizes the spectral energy around transitions inducing leakage and crosstalk errors. Finally, we combine CTS with model-based frequency optimization across the device and experimentally show a systematic reduction in the required qubit frequency bandwidth for high-fidelity simultaneous gates, supported by simulations of systems with up to 1000 qubits. By alleviating constraints on qubit frequency bandwidth for parallel single-qubit operations, this work represents an important step for scaling towards larger quantum processors.
Currently available quantum computing hardware based on superconducting transmon architectures realizes networks of hundreds of qubits with the possibility of controlled nearest-neighbor interactions. However, the inherent noise and decoherence effects of such quantum chips considerably alter basic gate operations and lead to imperfect outputs of the targeted quantum computations. In this work, we focus on the characterization of crosstalk effects, which manifest themselves in correlations between simultaneously executed quantum gates on neighboring qubits. After a short explanation of the physical origin of such correlations, we show how to efficiently and systematically characterize the magnitude of such crosstalk effects on an entire quantum chip using the randomized benchmarking protocol. We demonstrate the introduced protocol by running it on real quantum hardware provided by IBM and observe significant alterations in gate fidelities due to crosstalk. Lastly, based on the gained information, we propose more accurate means to simulate noisy quantum hardware by devising a crosstalk-aware noise model.