Robustness of controlled Hamiltonian approaches to unitary quantum gates

Abstract: We examine the effectiveness and resilience of achieving quantum gates employing three approaches stemming from quantum control methods: counterdiabatic driving, Floquet engineering, and inverse engineering. We critically analyse their performance in terms of the gate infidelity, the associated resource overhead based on energetic cost, the susceptibility to time-keeping errors, and the degradation under environmental noise. Despite significant differences in the dynamical path taken, we find a broadly consistent behavior across the three approaches in terms of the efficacy of implementing the target gate and the resource overhead. Furthermore, we establish that the functional form of the control fields plays a crucial role in determining how faithfully a gate operation is achieved. Our results are demonstrated for single qubit gates, with particular focus on the Hadamard gate, and we discuss the extension to $N$-qubit operations.