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arXiv:2601.10446

Minimal-Energy Optimal Control of Tunable Two-Qubit Gates in Superconducting Platforms Using Continuous Dynamical Decoupling

Adonai Hilário da Silva, Octávio da Motta, Leonardo Kleber Castelano, Reginaldo de Jesus Napolitano

quant-phSubmitted Jan 15, 2026• Announced Jan 16, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

We present a unified scheme for generating high-fidelity entangling gates in superconducting platforms by continuous dynamical decoupling (CDD) combined with variational minimal-energy optimal control. During the CDD stage, we suppress residual couplings, calibration drifting, and quasistatic noise, resulting in a stable effective Hamiltonian that preserves the designed ZZ interaction intended for producing tunable couplers. In this stable $\mathrm{SU}(4)$ manifold, we calculate smooth low-energy single-quibt control functions using a variational geodesic optimization process that directly minimizes gate infidelity. We illustrate the methodology by applying it to CZ, CX, and generic engangling gates, achieving virtually unit fidelity and robustness under restricted single-qubit action, with experimentally realistic control fields. These results establish CDD-enhanced variational geometric optimal control as a practical and noise-resilient scheme for designing superconducting entangling gates.

Comments
17 pages, 4 figures, 1 table

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We present a unified scheme for generating high-fidelity entangling gates in superconducting platforms by continuous dynamical decoupling (CDD) combined with variational minimal-energy optimal control. During the CDD stage, we suppress residual couplings, calibration drifting, and quasistatic noise, resulting in a stable effective Hamiltonian that preserves the designed ZZ interaction intended for producing tunable couplers. In this stable SU(4)\mathrm{SU}(4)SU(4) manifold, we calculate smooth low-energy single-quibt control functions using a variational geodesic optimization process that directly minimizes gate infidelity. We illustrate the methodology by applying it to CZ, CX, and generic engangling gates, achieving virtually unit fidelity and robustness under restricted single-qubit action, with experimentally realistic control fields. These results establish CDD-enhanced variational geometric optimal control as a practical and noise-resilient scheme for designing superconducting entangling gates.
Controllable interaction between superconducting qubits is desirable for large-scale quantum computation and simulation. Here, based on a theoretical proposal by Yan et al. [Phys. Rev. Appl. 10, 054061 (2018)] we experimentally demonstrate a simply designed and flux-controlled tunable coupler with a continuous tunability by adjusting the coupler frequency, which can completely turn off adjacent superconducting qubit coupling. Utilizing the tunable interaction between two qubits via the coupler, we implement a different type of controlled-phase (cz) gate with ``dynamically decoupled regime,'' which allows the qubit-qubit coupling to be only ``on'' at the usual operating point while dynamically ``off'' during the tuning process of one qubit frequency into and out of the operating point. This scheme not only efficiently suppresses the leakage out of the computational subspace, but also allows for the acquired two-qubit phase being geometric at the operating point. We achieve an average cz gate fidelity of $98.3\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.6\mathrm{%}$, which is dominantly limited by qubit decoherence. The demonstrated tunable coupler provides a desirable tool to suppress adjacent qubit coupling and is suitable for large-scale quantum computation and simulation.
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We introduce a strategy to develop optimally designed fields for continuous dynamical decoupling. Using our methodology, we obtain the optimal continuous field configuration to maximize the fidelity of a general one-qubit quantum gate. To achieve this, considering dephasing-noise perturbations, we employ an auxiliary qubit instead of the boson bath to implement a purification scheme, which results in unitary dynamics. Employing the sub-Riemannian geometry framework for the two-qubit unitary group, we derive and numerically solve the geodesic equations, obtaining the optimal time-dependent control Hamiltonian. Also, due to the extended time required to find solutions to the geodesic equations, we train a neural network on a subset of geodesic solutions, enabling us to promptly generate the time-dependent control Hamiltonian for any desired gate, which is crucial in circuit optimization.
The design of coupler-based superconducting two-qubit gates simplifies circuit layout and alleviate frequency crowding, thereby enhancing the scalability and flexibility of quantum chips. However, in such architectures, a trade-off often exists between suppressing crosstalk and reducing gate duration, and how to achieve synergistic optimization of both remains an open challenge. To address this, this paper proposes a coupler-assisted superconducting two-qubit geometric gate scheme oriented towards crosstalk robustness. By introducing additional parametric degrees of freedom, the scheme steers the system evolution along desired trajectories, thereby flexibly avoiding crosstalk-sensitive operational regions. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed scheme can effectively suppress crosstalk errors while enabling fast gate operations, and exhibits strong robustness against typical experimental imperfections such as qubit frequency drift. Moreover, even when accounting for unavoidable high-frequency oscillation terms and qubit decoherence in realistic physical systems, our crosstalk-robust two-qubit geometric gates still achieve high fidelity. This work provides a feasible pathway toward robust and efficient two-qubit gate implementation in superconducting quantum computation.
Environmental noise that couples longitudinally to a quantum system dephases that system and can limit its coherence lifetime. Performance using quantum superposition in clocks, information processors, communication networks, and sensors depends on careful state and external field selection to lower sensitivity to longitudinal noise. In many cases time varying external control fields--such as the Hahn echo sequence originally developed for nuclear magnetic resonance applications--can passively correct for longitudinal errors. There also exist continuous versions of passive correction called continuous dynamical decoupling (CDD), or spin-locking depending on context. However, treating quantum systems under CDD as qubits has not been well explored. Here, we develop universal single-qubit gates that are ``fast'' relative to perturbative Rabi gates and applicable to any CDD qubit architecture. We demonstrate single-qubit gates with fidelity F=0.9947(1)\mathcal{F}=0.9947(1)F=0.9947(1) on a frequency tunable CDD transmon superconducting circuit operated where it is strongly sensitive to longitudinal noise, thus establishing this technique as a potentially useful tool for operating qubits in applications requiring high fidelity under non-ideal conditions.