Agnostic Dynamical Decoupling for Single-Qubit Gates

TL;DR

This paper presents a noise-agnostic method for designing smooth single-qubit control pulses that suppress static errors and mediated couplings, enhancing gate robustness without detailed noise modeling.

Contribution

The authors introduce a new control pulse design approach that guarantees first-order error cancellation independently of the noise's microscopic details.

Findings

Effective suppression of static errors in single-qubit gates.

First-order decoupling of mediated inter-qubit interactions.

Numerical demonstrations show robust, smooth control fields.

Abstract

We introduce a method for designing smooth single-qubit control pulses that implement a desired gate while suppressing the effect of unknown static error sources to first order. Unlike dynamically corrected gate constructions that require prior knowledge of the noise model, the present approach is agnostic to the detailed form of the target-bath interaction. The method parametrizes the control propagator through an auxiliary matrix expansion over orthogonal basis functions and enforces decoupling through algebraic orthogonality and equal-norm constraints on the expansion coefficients. These conditions guarantee that the leading Magnus contribution of an arbitrary static interaction reduces to a term proportional to the identity on the target system, thereby cancelling first-order error effects independently of the microscopic origin of the noise. We further show that the same construction suppresses, to first order, mediated couplings between simultaneously controlled qubits when their interaction occurs through intermediate environmental degrees of freedom, yielding effective second-order decoupling of the induced inter-qubit interaction. By using a discrete cosine transform parametrization, the pulse-synthesis problem is cast into a numerically stable constrained optimization with a minimal number of free parameters. Numerical examples for $R_z$ rotations and random single-qubit unitaries demonstrate smooth control fields that realize the target gates while remaining robust against arbitrary static single-qubit noise and mediated multi-qubit couplings. These results provide a hardware-friendly route toward noise-agnostic dynamically corrected single-qubit gates.