Minimal Time Robust Two Qubit Gates in Circuit QED

Abstract: Fault tolerant quantum computing requires quantum gates with high fidelity. Decoherence reduces the fidelities of quantum gates when the operation time is too long. Optimal control techniques can be used to decrease the operation time in theory, but generally do not take into account the realistic nature of uncertainty regarding the system parameters. We apply robust optimal control techniques to demonstrate that it is feasible to reduce the operation time of the cross-resonance gate in superconducting systems to under 100\,ns with two-qubit gate fidelities of $\mathcal{F}>0.99$, where the gate fidelity will not be coherence limited. This is while ensuring robustness for up to 10\% uncertainty in the system, and having chosen a parameterization that aides in experimental feasibility. We find that the highest fidelity gates can be achieved in the shortest time for the multi-level qubits compared with a two-level qubit system. This suggests that non-computational levels may be useful for achieving shorter cross-resonance gate times with high fidelity. The results further indicate a minimal control time for experimentally feasible pulses with the inclusion of robustness and the maximum amount of uncertainty allowable to achieve fidelities with $\mathcal{F}>0.999$.