Geometric aspects of composite pulses

Unitary operations acting on a quantum system must be robust against systematic errors in control parameters for reliable quantum computing. Composite pulse technique in nuclear magnetic resonance realizes such a robust operation by employing a sequence of possibly poor-quality pulses. In this study, we demonstrate that two kinds of composite pulses-one compensates for a pulse length error in a one-qubit system and the other compensates for a J-coupling error in a two-qubit system-have a vanishing dynamical phase and thereby can be seen as geometric quantum gates, which implement unitary gates by the holonomy associated with dynamics of cyclic vectors defined in the text.