Leakage reduction in fast superconducting qubit gates via optimal control

Understand

Reaching high speed, high fidelity qubit operations requires precise control over the shape of the underlying pulses.

• For weakly anharmonic systems, such as superconducting transmon qubits, short gates lead to leakage to states outside of the computational subspace.
• Control pulses designed with open-loop optimal control may reduce such leakage.
• However, model inaccuracies can severely limit the usability of such pulses.