Scheduling Protocols for Context Aware Dynamical Decoupling

Effectively suppressing decoherence remains an ongoing problem in the control of quantum systems. An approach called Dynamical Decoupling (DD) has been shown to be effective in reducing error caused by a quantum system becoming increasingly entangled with its environment as it evolves. A specific type of error caused by crosstalk between qubits, parasitic ZZ-coupling, is a major problem affecting the usability of superconducting quantum systems [1, 2]. We introduce an adaptive DD approach based on various methods developed to address parasitic ZZ-coupling as well as more general environment induced decoherence. Our methods work by scheduling neighbor-aware DD sequences according to pulse and timing criteria across idling periods such that crosstalk cannot accumulate beyond a certain measure. One such method uses graph coloring to ensure that DD sequences are staggered in a way that mitigates crosstalk. Another method dynamically determines how to space sequences given pulse information and the device's timing constraints. Our approach was motivated by and validated using experiments on IBM hardware.

[1] Suppression of Crosstalk in Superconducting Qubits Using Dynamical Decoupling. Tripathi et al. Phys. Rev. Applied 18, 024068. 25 August 2022.

[2] Suppression of Qubit Crosstalk in a Tunable Coupling Superconducting Circuit. Mundada et al. Phys. Rev. Applied 12, 054023. 11 November 2019.