Designing short robust NOT gates for quantum computation

Composite pulses, originally developed in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), have found widespread use in experimental quantum information processing (QIP) to reduce the effects of systematic errors. Most pulses used so far have simply been adapted from existing NMR designs, and while techniques have been developed for designing composite pulses with arbitrary precision, the results have been quite complicated and have found little application. Here, I describe techniques for designing short but effective composite pulses to implement robust NOT gates, bringing together existing insights from NMR and QIP, and present some composite pulses.