Superrobust Geometric Control of a Superconducting Circuit

Geometric phases accompanying adiabatic quantum evolutions can be used to construct robust quantum control for quantum information processing due to their noise-resilient feature. A significant development along this line is to construct geometric gates using nonadiabatic quantum evolutions to reduce errors due to decoherence. However, it has been shown that nonadiabatic geometric gates are not necessarily more robust than dynamical ones, in contrast to an intuitive expectation. Here we experimentally investigate this issue for the case of nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation (NHQC) and show that conventional NHQC schemes cannot guarantee the expected robustness due to a cross-coupling to the states outside the computational space. We implement a different set of constraints for gate construction in order to suppress such cross-coupling to achieve an enhanced robustness. Using a superconducting quantum circuit, we demonstrate high-fidelity holonomic gates whose infidelity against quasistatic transverse errors can be suppressed up to the fourth order, instead of the second order in conventional NHQC and dynamical gates. In addition, we explicitly measure the accumulated dynamical phase due to the abovementioned cross-coupling and verify that it is indeed much reduced in our NHQC scheme. We further demonstrate a protocol for constructing two-qubit NHQC gates also with an enhanced robustness.

Automated summary

Geometric phases accompanying adiabatic quantum evolutions can be used to construct robust quantum control, but nonadiabatic geometric gates are not necessarily more robust than dynamical ones. Experimental investigation shows that conventional nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation (NHQC) schemes may not guarantee the expected robustness, whereas introducing different constraints for gate construction can achieve enhanced robustness. The study demonstrates high-fidelity holonomic gates with reduced errors and accumulated dynamical phase, and presents a protocol for constructing two-qubit NHQC gates with enhanced robustness.