Systematic Crosstalk Mitigation for Superconducting Qubits via Frequency-Aware Compilation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a frequency-aware compilation method that systematically tunes qubit frequencies to mitigate crosstalk in superconducting quantum computers, significantly improving program success rates on NISQ devices.

Contribution

It presents a novel software-based approach to reduce crosstalk by frequency tuning, enhancing fidelity without complex hardware modifications.

Findings

13.3x average improvement in worst-case success rate

Effective mitigation of frequency crowding effects

Comparable or better than complex architectural solutions

Abstract

One of the key challenges in current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers is to control a quantum system with high-fidelity quantum gates. There are many reasons a quantum gate can go wrong -- for superconducting transmon qubits in particular, one major source of gate error is the unwanted crosstalk between neighboring qubits due to a phenomenon called frequency crowding. We motivate a systematic approach for understanding and mitigating the crosstalk noise when executing near-term quantum programs on superconducting NISQ computers. We present a general software solution to alleviate frequency crowding by systematically tuning qubit frequencies according to input programs, trading parallelism for higher gate fidelity when necessary. The net result is that our work dramatically improves the crosstalk resilience of tunable-qubit, fixed-coupler hardware, matching or surpassing other more complex architectural designs such as tunable-coupler systems. On NISQ benchmarks, we improve worst-case program success rate by 13.3x on average, compared to existing traditional serialization strategies.