Quantum optimal control robust to $1/f^\alpha$ noises using fractional calculus: voltage-controlled exchange in semiconductor spin qubits

TL;DR

This paper develops fractional calculus-based methods to design robust voltage control pulses for quantum dot spin qubits, significantly improving gate fidelity under $1/f^eta$ charge noise.

Contribution

It introduces a novel fractional calculus approach to optimize voltage pulses for quantum gates, accounting for different noise dynamics and improving robustness.

Findings

Optimal exchange pulses are long and weak under stationary noise.

Fast, high-amplitude pulses are still effective for nonstationary noise.

Methods improve quantum gate fidelity in voltage-controlled qubits.

Abstract

Low-frequency $1/f^\alpha$ charge noise significantly hinders the performance of voltage-controlled spin qubits in quantum dots. Here, we utilize fractional calculus to design voltage control pulses yielding the highest average fidelities for noisy quantum gate operations. We focus specifically on the exponential voltage control of the exchange interaction generating two-spin $\mathrm{SWAP}^k$ gates. When stationary charge noise is the dominant source of gate infidelity, we derive that the optimal exchange pulse is long and weak, with the broad shape of the symmetric beta distribution function with parameter $1-\alpha/2$. The common practice of making exchange pulses fast and high-amplitude still remains beneficial in the case of strongly nonstationary noise dynamics, modeled as fractional Brownian motion. The proposed methods are applicable to the characterization and optimization of quantum gate operations in various voltage-controlled qubit architectures.