Landau-Zener gates, errors, and refocusing

M. I. Dykman, Léa Ferreira dos Santos, Christian Hicke

Christian Hicke, Léa Ferreira dos Santos, M. I. Dykman

We present a method to perform fault-tolerant single-qubit gate operations using Landau-Zener tunneling. In a single Landau-Zener pulse, the qubit transition frequency is varied in time so that it passes through the frequency of the radiation field. We show that a simple three-pulse sequence allows eliminating errors in the gate up to the third order in errors in the qubit energies or the radiation frequency.

Galina Nemova

Alexei Kitaev

Li Wang, Tao Tu, Bo Gong +2 more

High fidelity universal gates for quantum bits form an essential ingredient of quantum information processing. In particular, geometric gates have attracted attention because they have a higher intrinsic resistance to certain errors. However, their realization remains a challenge because of the need for complicated quantum control on a multi-level structure as well as meeting the adiabatic condition within a short decoherence time. Here, we demonstrate non-adiabatic quantum operations for a two-level system by applying a well-controlled geometric Landau-Zener-Stückelberg interferometry. By characterizing the gate quality, we also investigate the operation in the presence of realistic dephasing. Furthermore, the result provides an essential model suitable for understanding an interplay of geometric phase and Landau-Zener-Stückelberg process which are well explored separately.

Borhan Ahmadi

Classical microwave drives are usually treated as ideal phase-coherent work sources for superconducting-qubit control. What if such a drive is replaced by a finite quantum battery. As a demanding benchmark, we consider echo-refocused geometric Landau--Zener interferometry powered by a single quantized bosonic mode. The qubit--battery dynamics are described by a Jaynes--Cummings Hamiltonian, while the echo pulse is retained as a qubit-only refocusing operation that cancels the dynamical phase. In the macroscopic coherent-state limit, the usual classical geometric interferometer is recovered. At finite mean photon number, however, the Jaynes--Cummings coupling generates photon-number-resolved avoided crossings with gaps $Ω_n=2g\sqrt{n}$. The qubit-only echo redistributes amplitudes between neighboring excitation sectors, so the finite-battery protocol is not a single classical interferometer but a coherent sector-resolved quantum evolution. This produces contrast loss, interferogram distortions, and measurable battery back-action. We further show that reducing photon-number fluctuations alone is not sufficient: geometric control requires a first-order phase reference. Geometric Landau--Zener interferometry therefore provides a practical benchmark for certifying phase-coherent quantum-battery energy.