Enhanced superconducting qubit gates via accelerated adiabatic evolution

Qubit gates based on adiabatic evolution are in principle attractive, as they exhibit in-built robustness: they are in principle insensitive to the amplitude, duration and phase of control pulses used to realize the gate. However, the requirement of adiabaticity makes them extremely slow, and hence impractical in many settings. Here, we show how counter-diabatic driving techniques can be used to design one and two qubit gates that have many of the advantages of purely adiabatic gates, but are at the same time fast. We focus on approaches based on accelerated STIRAP (stimulated Raman adiabatic passage) [1, 2], and on specific implementations in various superconducting circuit architectures (both for transmon style qubits, and for fluxonium style qubits).

[1] K. Bergmann, H. Theuer, and B. W. Shore, Rev. Mod. Phys. 70, 1003–1025 (1998).
[2] A. Baksic, H. Ribeiro, and A. A. Clerk, Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 230503 (2016).