Establishing a physical model for a chain of superconducting qubits

The dynamics in a system of coupled qubits is proven to be computationally hard. Harnessing the computation power associated with these complex dynamics requires controlling the evolution with high fidelity, which in turn requires knowing the physical parameters of the system with high accuracy. Using a few coupled superconducting qubits, we discuss a method for extracting the values of the physical parameters of the system. In addition to the direct spectroscopy of the eigen-modes of the system, we generate controlled dynamics and measure the evolution of certain observables to refine the knowledge of the parameters obtained from spectroscopy. We discuss the accuracy of this calibration technique in terms of the requirements for performing a classically challenging computation.