Quantum crosstalk analysis for simultaneous gate operations on superconducting qubits

Abstract: Maintaining or even improving gate performance with growing numbers of parallel controlled qubits is a vital requirement for fault-tolerant quantum computing. For superconducting quantum processors, though isolated one- or two-qubit gates have been demonstrated with high-fidelity, implementing these gates in parallel commonly shows worse performance. Generally, this degradation is attributed to various crosstalks between qubits, such as quantum crosstalk due to residual inter-qubit coupling. An understanding of the exact nature of these crosstalks is critical to figuring out respective mitigation schemes and improved qubit architecture designs with low crosstalk. Here we give a theoretical analysis of quantum crosstalk impact on simultaneous gate operations in a qubit architecture, where fixed-frequency transmon qubits are coupled via a tunable bus, and sub-100-ns controlled-Z (CZ) gates can be realized by applying a baseband flux pulse on the bus. Our analysis shows that for microwave-driven single-qubit gates, the dressing from the qubit-qubit coupling can cause non-negligible cross-driving errors when qubits operate near frequency collision regions. During CZ gate operations, although unwanted near-neighbor interactions are nominally turned off, sub-MHz parasitic next-near-neighbor interactions involving spectator qubits can still exist, causing considerable leakage or control error when one operates qubit systems around these parasitic resonance points. To ensure high-fidelity simultaneous operations, there could raise a request to figure out a better way to balance the gate error from target qubit systems themselves and the error from non-participating spectator qubits. Overall, our analysis suggests that towards useful quantum processors, the qubit architecture should be examined carefully in the context of high-fidelity simultaneous gate operations in a scalable qubit lattice.