Soft-pulse dynamical decoupling with Markovian decoherence

We consider the effect of broadband decoherence on the performance of refocusing sequences, having in mind applications of dynamical decoupling in concatenation with quantum error correcting codes as the first stage of coherence protection. Specifically, we construct cumulant expansions of effective decoherence operators for a qubit driven by a pulse of a generic symmetric shape and for several sequences of pi and pi/2 pulses. While, in general, the performance of soft pulses in decoupling sequences in the presence of Markovian decoherence is worse than that of the ideal delta pulses, it can be substantially improved by shaping.