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arXiv:2606.21762

Dynamical Decoupling using Universal Optimal Tracking

Amit Devra, Emanuel Malvetti, Niklas J. Glaser, Abhishek Agarwal, Ivan Rungger, Santana Lujan, Max Werninghaus, Stefan Filipp, Leo Van Damme, Steffen J. Glaser

quant-phSubmitted Jun 19, 2026• Announced Jun 23, 2026• 0 citations

v1 · Jun 19, 2026 v2 · Oct 25, 2026

Abstract

Dynamical decoupling (DD) is a widely used and resource-efficient technique for error suppression, but conventional DD relies on periodically repeating a short pulse block to refocus the qubit state during idle periods. Imperfections in this block cause residual errors to accumulate, ultimately degrading state recovery over long idle times. Here, we introduce a universal optimal tracking approach that extends the original tracking concept to a fully state-independent setting for designing DD sequences. By monitoring the qubit's evolution at predefined waypoints during optimization, the method dynamically compensates residual errors while preserving regular refocusing. Experimental demonstrations on a superconducting-qubit platform confirm the suppression of error accumulation under static control imperfections, in agreement with numerical predictions. Complementary simulations further show that optimal-tracking-based sequences maintain strong performance under time-dependent noise. These results establish optimal tracking as a practical and hardware-agnostic approach to designing short, robust DD sequences suitable for noisy quantum devices.

Comments: 10 pages plus appendix and bibliography; 10 figures

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Dynamical decoupling (DD) refers to a well-established family of methods for error mitigation, comprising pulse sequences aimed at averaging away slowly evolving noise in quantum systems. Here we revisit the question of its efficacy in the presence of noisy pulses in scenarios important for quantum devices today: pulses with gate control errors, and the computational setting where DD is used to reduce noise in every computational gate. We focus on the well-known schemes of periodic (or universal) DD and its extension, concatenated DD, for scaling up its power. The qualitative conclusions from our analysis of these two schemes nevertheless apply to other DD approaches. In the presence of noisy pulses, DD does not always mitigate errors. It does so only when the added noise from the imperfect DD pulses does not outweigh the increased ability in averaging away the original background noise. We present break-even conditions that delineate when DD is useful, and further find that there is a limit in the performance of concatenated DD, specifically in how far one can concatenate the DD pulse sequences before the added noise no longer offers any further benefit in error mitigation.