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arXiv:2607.07999

Optimizing LZSM protocol for high-fidelity gates in open-system fluxonium

Santiago Ferreyra, Valentın Reparaz, Maria Jose Sanchez, Leandro Tosi, Daniel Dominguez

quant-phcond-mat.supr-conSubmitted Jul 9, 2026• Announced Jul 10, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

Quantum gates based on resonant Rabi oscillations are inherently slow for small-frequency qubits. They are also prone to errors due to counter-rotating terms. However, when the anharmonicity is sufficiently high, as in the fluxonium architecture, alternative manipulation protocols can outperform standard resonant driving. In this work, we implement fast, high-fidelity quantum gates based on a one-period Landau-Zener-Stückelberg-Majorana (LZSM) driving protocol. We derive analytical expressions that simplify the exploration of the parameter space while accounting for the multi-level structure of the circuit. Furthermore, we analyze the role of leakage, discussing strategies to mitigate it and identifying regimes in which it becomes the dominant source of error. Finally, to evaluate the impact of dissipation on gate fidelity, we develop a robust formalism suitable for analyzing the open-system performance of quantum gates in the strong driving regime.

Comments
13 pages, 8 figures

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Quantum gates based on resonant Rabi oscillations are inherently slow for small-frequency qubits. They are also prone to errors due to counter-rotating terms. However, when the anharmonicity is sufficiently high, as in the fluxonium architecture, alternative manipulation protocols can outperform standard resonant driving. In this work, we implement fast, high-fidelity quantum gates based on a one-period Landau-Zener-Stückelberg-Majorana (LZSM) driving protocol. We derive analytical expressions that simplify the exploration of the parameter space while accounting for the multi-level structure of the circuit. Furthermore, we analyze the role of leakage, discussing strategies to mitigate it and identifying regimes in which it becomes the dominant source of error. Finally, to evaluate the impact of dissipation on gate fidelity, we develop a robust formalism suitable for analyzing the open-system performance of quantum gates in the strong driving regime.
Fast quantum gates are of paramount importance for enabling efficient and error-resilient quantum computations. In the present work we analyze Landau-Zener-St\"uckelberg-Majorana (LZSM) strong driving protocols, tailored to implement fast gates with particular emphasis on small-gap qubits. We derive analytical equations to determine the specific set of driving parameters for the implementation of single-qubit and two-qubit gates employing single-period sinusoidal pulses. Our approach circumvents the need to scan experimentally a wide range of parameters and instead it allows to concentrate on fine-tuning the device near the analytically predicted values. We analyze the dependence of relaxation and decoherence on the amplitude and frequency of the pulses, obtaining the optimal regime of driving parameters to mitigate the effects of the environment. Our study focus on the single-qubit ${X}_{\frac{\ensuremath{\pi}}{2}}, {Y}_{\frac{\ensuremath{\pi}}{2}}$ and identity gates. Also, we propose the bSWAP\sqrt{\mathrm{bSWAP}}bSWAP​ as the simplest two-qubit gate attainable through a robust LZSM driving protocol.
We determine the optimal quantum manipulation protocols for implementing high-fidelity, fast single-qubit gates. We demonstrate that the time-optimal pulse sequence is a ``bang-bang'' sequence: discrete pulses of either positive or negative maximum amplitude or zero. The non-adiabatic bang-bang pulse sequence minimizes gate duration providing a speedup for low-frequency architectures. We first derive the protocol for a transversally driven two-level system, extracting exact analytic expressions for minimum gate times. We then extend this framework to general multilevel architectures, identifying conditions that enable the coherent suppression of leakage errors. Using the fluxonium circuit as a representative case study, we optimize X/2X/2X/2 and Y/2Y/2Y/2 gates through a combination of discrete bang sequences and continuous waveform smoothing. This approach preserves near-optimal execution speeds while mitigating transitions outside the computational subspace. Open-system simulations demonstrate that these sequences outperform commensurate and resonant pulse schemes across different fluxonium regimes, achieving low-error manipulation significantly faster than standard resonant control, even in the presence of 1/f1/f1/f flux noise and dissipation.
A conventional realization of quantum logic gates and control is based on resonant Rabi oscillations of the occupation probability of the system. This approach has certain limitations and complications, like counter-rotating terms. We study an alternative paradigm for implementing quantum logic gates based on Landau-Zener-Stückelberg-Majorana (LZSM) interferometry with nonresonant driving and the alternation of adiabatic evolution and nonadiabatic transitions. Compared to Rabi oscillations, the main differences are a nonresonant driving frequency and a small number of periods in the external driving. We explore the dynamics of a multilevel quantum system under LZSM drives and optimize the parameters for increasing the gate speed. We define the parameters of the external driving required for implementing a specific quantum logic gate using the adiabatic-impulse model. In particular, we demonstrate the implementations of single-qubit X, Y, Hadamard gates, and two-qubit i and gates using the LZSM transitions. The considered LZSM approach for implementing arbitrary quantum logic gates can be applied to a large variety of multilevel quantum systems and external driving. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Qubit decoherence unavoidably degrades the fidelity of quantum logic gates. Accordingly, realizing gates that are as fast as possible is a guiding principle for qubit control, necessitating protocols for mitigating error channels that become significant as gate time is decreased. One such error channel arises from the counter-rotating component of strong, linearly polarized drives. This error channel is particularly important when gate times approach the qubit Larmor period and represents the dominant source of infidelity for sufficiently fast single-qubit gates with low-frequency qubits such as fluxonium. In this work, we develop and demonstrate two complementary protocols for mitigating this error channel. The first protocol realizes circularly polarized driving in circuit QED through simultaneous charge and flux control. The second protocol—commensurate pulses—leverages the coherent and periodic nature of counter-rotating fields to regularize their contributions to gates, enabling single-qubit gate fidelities reliably exceeding 99.997%. This protocol is platform independent and requires no additional calibration overhead. This work establishes straightforward strategies for mitigating counter-rotating effects from strong drives in circuit QED and other platforms, which we expect to be helpful in the effort to realize high-fidelity control for fault-tolerant quantum computing. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Achieving very fast gates that undercut the natural limits set by decoherence requires going into the strong driving limit. Realizing single-qubit control predicted beyond semi-classical, time-dependent modeling has yet to be experimentally realized on superconducting and most other computing platforms. In this regime, the common model of dynamics within a three-level manifold breaks down, and instead, we see new quantum error channels growing abruptly with decreasing time. To identify these error processes we systematically calculate the effect of multi-photon transitions that occur out of the computational space. We then derive analytical formulas to suppress these effects, as well as amplitude and phase errors on the qubit space; we term these R1D for suppressing the ∣0⟩−∣2⟩|0\rangle-|2\rangle∣0⟩−∣2⟩ transition and R2D when also suppressing ∣1⟩−∣3⟩|1\rangle-|3\rangle∣1⟩−∣3⟩ leakage. We also answer long-standing questions about the optimal values of the DRAG prefactor as well as constant detuning, when accounting for time-ordering, and also show how to calibrate other prefactors for further performance improvement. Upon correcting these varied sources of error, we numerically demonstrate gate infidelities below 10−510^{-5}10−5 for a 7ns πππ-rotation when incorporating existing decoherence rates.
In many quantum platforms, single-qubit gates are applied using a linear drive resonant with the qubit transition frequency, which is often theoretically described within the rotating-wave approximation (RWA). However, for fast gates on low-frequency qubits, the RWA may not hold and we need to consider the contribution from counterrotating terms to the qubit dynamics. The inclusion of counterrotating terms into the theoretical description gives rise to two challenges. First, it becomes challenging to analytically calculate the time evolution as the Hamiltonian is no longer self-commuting. Moreover, the time evolution now depends on the carrier phase such that, in general, every operation in a sequence of gates is different. In this work, we derive and verify a correction to the drive pulses that minimizes the effect of these counterrotating terms in a two-level system. We then derive a second correction term that arises from noncomputational levels for a strongly anharmonic system. We experimentally implement these correction terms on a fluxonium superconducting qubit, which is an example of a strongly anharmonic, low-frequency qubit for which the RWA may not hold, and demonstrate how fast, high-fidelity single-qubit gates can be achieved without the need for additional hardware and calibration complexities.