In transmon qubits, the leading source of errors for quantum gates is the existence of higher energy levels, besides the |0> and |1> states which form the computational subspace. Several methods have been developed to eliminate these errors systematically by clever use of the available experimental controls. In this bachelor thesis we focus on performing quantum gates on multiple qubits simultaneously, when transition frequencies of different qubits are close to each other. The existing solution is designed to perform a quantum gate on one qubit, while eliminating all the effects on the other one. We develop a procedure to create new analytic pulse shapes which produce low-error gates for single qubits and we generalize this approach to multi-qubit systems to apply multiple quantum gates at the same time. For both single- and two-qubit gates these new pulses reduce errors by several orders of magnitude compared to simple driving pulses. In addition we combine these optimal analytical pulse shapes with multi-parameter pulses. The parameters of this additional pulse are optimized numerically, to produce even lower gate errors.
Abstract Semiconductor spin qubits demonstrated single-qubit gates with fidelities up to 99.9 % benchmarked in the single-qubit subspace. However, tomographic characterizations reveal non-negligible crosstalk errors in a larger space. Additionally, it was long thought that the two-qubit gate performance is limited by charge noise, which couples to the qubits via the exchange interaction. Here, we show that coherent error sources such as a limited bandwidth of the control signals, diabaticity errors, microwave crosstalk, and non-linear transfer functions can equally limit the fidelity. We report a simple theoretical framework for pulse optimization that relates erroneous dynamics to spectral concentration problems and allows for the reuse of existing signal shaping methods on a larger set of gate operations. We apply this framework to common gate operations for spin qubits and show that simple pulse shaping techniques can significantly improve the performance of these gate operations in the presence of such coherent error sources. The methods presented in the paper were used to demonstrate two-qubit gate fidelities with F > 99.5 % in Xue et al (2022 Nature 601 343). We also find that single and two-qubit gates can be optimized using the same pulse shape. We use analytic derivations and numerical simulations to arrive at predicted gate fidelities greater than 99.9% with duration less than, 4 / ( Δ E z ) where Δ E z is the difference in qubit frequencies.
Recent experimental work on superconducting transmon qubits in three-dimensional (3D) cavities shows that their coherence times are increased by an order of magnitude compared to their two-dimensional cavity counterparts. However, to take advantage of these coherence times while scaling up the number of qubits it is advantageous to address individual qubits which are all coupled to the same 3D cavity fields. The challenge in controlling this system comes from spectral crowding, where the leakage transition of qubits is close to computational transitions in other qubits. Here, it is shown that fast pulses are possible which address single qubits using two-quadrature control of the pulse envelope, while the derivative removal by adiabatic gate method of Motzoi et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 110501 (2009)] alone only gives marginal improvements over the conventional Gaussian pulse shape. On the other hand, a first-order result using the Magnus expansion gives a fast analytical pulse shape which gives a high-fidelity gate for a specific gate time, up to a phase factor on the second qubit. Further numerical analysis corroborates these results and yields to even faster gates, showing that leakage-state anharmonicity does not provide a fundamental quantum speed limit.
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.
The main source of error for superconducting quantum processors today is two-qubit gates, so understanding what limits their fidelity is central to improving these devices. This thesis studies the controlled-Z (CZ) gate between two transmon qubits, realized by tuning the
∣11⟩ and
∣20⟩ states through an avoided crossing with a flux pulse. There are two primary errors inherent to this approach. The first is leakage into non-computational states like
∣20⟩; the second is an exchange error from population transferring between the single-excitation states
∣01⟩ and
∣10⟩. Using a closed-system simulation, this work compares four flux-pulse shapes (unipolar, net-zero bipolar, Gaussian-filtered bipolar, and adiabatic) and constructs a CNOT from each CZ. The central question is which error channel sets the gate fidelity, and whether the widely used net-zero pulse, known to protect neighboring qubits, also helps inside the gate itself. An important finding of this research is that every type of flux pulse has an average gate fidelity limited by exchange error rather than leakage. While the exchange error is not apparent in the return of the
∣11⟩ population, because excitation-number conservation prevents
∣11⟩ from entering the single-excitation sector, it does appear as an off-diagonal term in the CZ unitary, and subsequently in the CNOT. A second finding concerns the net-zero pulse: although its zero net flux integral cancels the first-order phase imprinted on neighboring qubits, it does not suppress the exchange error. The strong suppression observed in the analytic bipolar gate happens because its idle time leaves the exchange oscillation near a cancellation point at the end of the gate, not because the pulse is net-zero. The flux operating point predicted by the simulation was tested on a physical transmon device accessed remotely, where a square pulse produced a
180∘ conditional phase close to the simulated flux and duration. Because the model is closed-system, the reported fidelities describe the coherent error of each pulse rather than the total infidelity of a physical device.
Electron spins trapped in quantum dots have recently proven to be a promising technology for the implementation of qubits, already demonstrating high fidelity single- and two-qubits gates. The next step towards fault-tolerant quantum computing is to increase the number of so-called spin qubits on the processor. However, this poses several challenges, one of which being how to implement single-qubit gates in multi-qubit systems, with high fidelity. This work focused on two aspects. The first one was to identify the physical phenomena and limitations that hinder the realisation of high fidelity single-qubit gates in multi-qubit environments. The second objective was to investigate, implement and optimise methods in order to minimise the impact of these perturbing phenomena. The identified perturbing effects include unwanted driving between a pulse and the neighbouring qubits, as well as frequency shifts induced by drive-spin coupling and non-ideal pulse in experimental setups. Crosstalk was addressed using pulse shaping (i.e. amplitude or phase modulation of the driving pulse to tailor its spectral characteristics and reduce the energy transmitted at unwanted frequencies). The performance of shapes taken from both NMR and signal processing literature was investigated, for various pulse parameters, through an extensive grid search. In addition, a frequency correction algorithm was devised: off-resonant drive frequencies are selected so that the shifted qubits are resonantly driven. It currently accounts for two phenomena: the AC Stark and Bloch-Siegert shifts. The algorithm furthermore tracks the changes caused by the time-dependent characteristics of the shaped pulses. The proposed frequency correction algorithm was shown to almost entirely negate the effects of the considered shifts, leading to unitary fidelity improvements by up to 55%. In addition, pulse shaping was demonstrated to noticeably improve the fidelity of simultaneous single-qubit rotations compared to unshaped driving. Rotations with fidelities as high as 99.98% were obtained for pi/2 rotations on two-qubits systems. Moreover, shapes whose Fourier transform is narrow and sharp, associated with low Rabi frequencies, were demonstrated to generally provide the highest fidelities of the tested configurations. Lastly, the trends and guidelines highlighted by these results were shown to scale to systems with larger numbers of qubits. The correction techniques investigated in this work have proven promising for the implementation of high fidelity single-qubit gates in multi-qubit systems. In particular, the guidelines for selecting a well-performing pulse shape should also be useful for the design of optimised driving schemes, regardless of the number of qubits involved. Additionally, the proposed frequency shift correction algorithm is expected to be able to handle arbitrary shifts, and so to be easily adaptable to use in experiments.
We show that it is theoretically possible to use higher energy levels for storing and controlling two qubits within a superconducting transmon. This is done by identifying energy levels as product states between multiple effecitve qubits. As a proof of concept we realise a complete set of gates necessary for universal computing by numerically optimising control pulses for single qubit gates on each of the qubits, entangling gates between the two qubits in one transmon, and an entangling gate between two qubits from two coupled transmons. The optimisation considers parameters which could make it possible to validate this experimentally. With these control pulses it is in principle possible to double the number of available qubits without any overhead in hardware. The additional qubits could be used in algorithms which need many short-living qubits such as syndrom qubits in error correction or by embedding effecitve higher connectivity in qubit networks.