Suppressing spurious transitions using spectrally balanced derivative pulse

In scalable superconducting quantum computing, spurious transitions due to crosstalk degrade the performance of quantum operations. The Derivative Removal by Adiabatic Gate (DRAG) technique has been widely used for eliminating the leakage to non-computational levels during single-qubit gate operations. In this work, we propose and demonstrate a practical pulse-shaping technique extended from DRAG for suppressing spurious transition between qubits in a superconducting quantum processor. Our pulse features balanced spectral shaping which leads to effective blocking of specific transitions. This method can be extended to the case with multiple unwanted couplings among multiple qubits. It can further be used to suppress the loss resulting from the harmful interactions between the qubits and two-level systems or other undesired parasitic couplings to facilitate the realization of scalable quantum computing.