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arXiv:2503.09343 · IEEE Transactions on Quantum Engineering

SU(4) Gate Design via Unitary Process Tomography: Its Application to Cross-Resonance-Based Superconducting Quantum Devices

Michihiko Sugawara, Takahiko Satoh

Published Jan 1, 2025• 4 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We present a novel approach for implementing pulse-efficient SU(4) gates on cross resonance (CR)-based superconducting quantum devices. Our method introduces a parameterized unitary derived from the CR-Hamiltonian propagator, which accounts for static-$ZZ$interactions. Leveraging the Weyl chamber's geometric structure, we successfully realize a continuous 2-qubit basis gate,$R_{ZZ}(\theta)$, as an echo-free pulse schedule on the IBM Quantum deviceibm_kawasaki. We evaluate the average fidelity and gate time of various SU(4) gates generated using the$R_{ZZ}(\theta)$to confirm the advantages of our implementation.

DOI
10.1109/tqe.2025.3585413

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We present a novel approach for implementing pulse-efficient SU(4) gates on cross resonance (CR)-based superconducting quantum devices. Our method introduces a parameterized unitary derived from the CR-Hamiltonian propagator, which accounts for static-ZZZZZZinteractions. Leveraging the Weyl chamber's geometric structure, we successfully realize a continuous 2-qubit basis gate,RZZ(θ)R_{ZZ}(\theta)RZZ​(θ), as an echo-free pulse schedule on the IBM Quantum deviceibm_kawasaki. We evaluate the average fidelity and gate time of various SU(4) gates generated using theRZZ(θ)R_{ZZ}(\theta)RZZ​(θ)to confirm the advantages of our implementation.
We show a pulse-efficient circuit transpilation framework for noisy quantum hardware. This is achieved by scaling cross-resonance pulses and exposing each pulse as a gate to remove redundant single-qubit operations with the transpiler. Crucially, no additional calibration is needed to yield better results than a CNOT-based transpilation. This pulse-efficient circuit transpilation therefore enables a better usage of the finite coherence time without requiring knowledge of pulse-level details from the user. As demonstration, we realize a continuous family of cross-resonance-based gates for SU(4) by leveraging Cartan's decomposition. We measure the benefits of a pulse-efficient circuit transpilation with process tomography and observe up to a 50% error reduction in the fidelity of ${R}_{ZZ}(\ensuremath{\theta})$ and arbitrary SU(4) gates on IBM Quantum devices. We apply this framework for quantum applications by running circuits of the quantum approximate optimization algorithm applied to MAXCUT. For an 11-qubit nonhardware native graph, our methodology reduces the overall schedule duration by up to 52% and errors by up to 38%.
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Current implementations of superconducting qubits are often limited by the low fidelities of multi-qubit gates. We present a reproducible and runtime-efficient pulse-level approach for calibrating an improved cross-resonance gate CR(θθθ) for arbitrary θθθ. This CR(θθθ) gate can be used to produce a wide range of other two-qubit gates via the application of standard single-qubit gates. By performing an interleaved randomised benchmarking experiment, we demonstrate that our approach leads to a significantly higher noise resistance than the circuit-level approach currently used by IBM. Hence, our procedure provides a genuine improvement for applications where noise remains a limiting factor.
Abstract Current implementations of superconducting qubits are often limited by the low fidelities of multi-qubit gates. We present a reproducible and runtime-efficient pulse-level approach for calibrating an improved cross-resonance gate CR(θ) for arbitrary θ. This CR(θ) gate can be used to produce a wide range of other two-qubit gates via the application of standard single-qubit gates. By performing an interleaved randomised benchmarking sequence, we demonstrate that our approach leads to significantly lower incoherent errors than the circuit-level approach currently used by IBM. Hence, our procedure provides a genuine improvement for applications where noise remains a limiting factor.
We present improvements in both theoretical understanding and experimental implementation of the cross resonance (CR) gate that have led to shorter two-qubit gate times and interleaved randomized benchmarking fidelities exceeding 99%. The CR gate is an all-microwave two-qubit gate that does not require tunability and is therefore well suited to quantum computing architectures based on two-dimensional superconducting qubits. The performance of the gate has previously been hindered by long gate times and fidelities averaging 94--96%. We have developed a calibration procedure that accurately measures the full CR Hamiltonian. The resulting measurements agree with theoretical analysis of the gate and also elucidate the error terms that have previously limited gate fidelity. The increase in fidelity that we have achieved was accomplished by introducing a second microwave drive tone on the target qubit to cancel unwanted components of the CR Hamiltonian.
Cross-resonance (CR) gates have emerged as a promising scheme for fault-tolerant quantum computation with fixed-frequency qubits. We experimentally implement an entangling CR gate by using a microwave-only control in a tunable coupling superconducting circuit, where the tunable coupler provides extra degrees of freedom to verify optimal conditions for constructing a CR gate. By developing a three-qubit Hamiltonian tomography protocol, we systematically investigate the dependency of gate fidelities on spurious qubit interactions and present the first experimental approach to the evaluation of the perturbation impact arising from spectator qubits. Our results reveal that the spectator qubits lead to reductions in CR gate fidelity dependent on ZZ interactions and particular frequency detunings between spectator and gate qubits. The target spectator demonstrates a more serious impact than the control spectator under a standard echo pulse scheme, whereas the degradation of gate fidelity is observed up to 22.5% as both the spectators are present with a modest ZZ coupling to the computational qubits. Our experiments uncover an optimal CR operation regime, and the method we develop here can readily be applied to improving other kinds of two-qubit gates in large-scale quantum circuits.