Superadiabatic Control of Quantum Operations

Jonathan Vandermause, Chandrasekhar Ramanathan

Published 2015-12-15Version 1

Adiabatic pulses are used extensively to enable robust control of quantum operations. We introduce a new approach to adiabatic control that uses the superadiabatic quality or Q-factor as a performance metric to design robust, high fidelity pulses. Our approach permits the systematic design of quantum control schemes to maximize the adabaticity of a unitary operation in a given time interval, given the available control resources. We numerically examine the interplay between adiabaticity, fidelity and robustness of the resulting pulses for the case of single-qubit inversion, and demonstrate the improved robustness of superadiabatic pulses. We introduce a numerical search strategy to implement a broader class of adiabatic operations, including multi-qubit adiabatic uni- taries, and demonstrate the utility of the technique by designing control waveforms that adiabatically implement a two-qubit entangling gate for a model system.