Methods and Results for Quantum Optimal Pulse Control on Superconducting Qubit Systems

TL;DR

This paper develops physics-guided quantum optimal control methods to design improved control pulses for superconducting qubits, demonstrating experimentally on IBM Q hardware that these pulses enhance quantum gate fidelity, especially for single-qubit gates.

Contribution

It introduces a physics-guided quantum optimal control approach for superconducting qubits and validates its effectiveness through experimental implementation on IBM Q hardware.

Findings

Optimized pulses improve quantum gate fidelity.

Single-qubit gates benefit most from the optimized pulses.

Experimental results show fidelity improvements over default gates.

Abstract

The effective use of current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices is often limited by the noise which is caused by interaction with the environment and affects the fidelity of quantum gates. In transmon qubit systems, the quantum gate fidelity can be improved by applying control pulses that can minimize the effects of the environmental noise. In this work, we employ physics-guided quantum optimal control strategies to design optimal pulses driving quantum gates on superconducting qubit systems. We test our results by conducting experiments on the IBM Q hardware using their OpenPulse API. We compare the performance of our pulse-optimized quantum gates against the default quantum gates and show that the optimized pulses improve the fidelity of the quantum gates, in particular the single-qubit gates. We discuss the challenges we encountered in our work and point to possible future improvements.