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The quantum approximate optimisation algorithm was proposed as a heuristic method for solving combinatorial optimisation problems on near-term quantum computers and may be among the first algorithms to perform useful computations in the post-supremacy, noisy, intermediate scale era of quantum computing. In this work, we exploit the recently proposed digital-analog quantum computation paradigm, in which the versatility of programmable universal quantum computers and the error resilience of quantum simulators are combined to improve platforms for quantum computation. We show that the digital-analog paradigm is suited to the variational quantum approximate optimisation algorithm, due to its inherent resilience against coherent errors, by performing large-scale simulations and providing analytical bounds for its performance in devices with finite single-qubit operation times. We observe regimes of single-qubit operation speed in which the considered variational algorithm provides a significant improvement over non-variational counterparts., Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures

We develop a model of a quantum field confined within a cavity with a movable wall where the position of the wall is quantized. We obtain a full description of the dynamics of both the quantum field and the confining wall depending on the initial state of the whole system. Both the reaction and back-reaction of the field on the wall, and the wall on the field, can be taken into account, as well as external driving forces on both the cavity and the wall. The model exactly reproduces the resonant cavity mode stimulation due to the periodic motion of the mirror (dynamical Casimir effect), as well as the standard radiation pressure effects on the quantized wall(optomechanics). The model also accounts for the interplay of the two scenarios. Finally, the time evolution of the radiation force shows the interplay between the static and dynamical Casimir effect., 19 pages, 4 figures

The Second Quantum Revolution facilitates the engineering of new classes of sensors, communication technologies, and computers with unprecedented capabilities. Supply chains for quantum technologies are emerging, some focused on commercially available components for enabling technologies and/or quantum-technologies research infrastructures, others with already higher technology-readiness levels, near to the market.In 2018, the European Commission has launched its large-scale and long-term Quantum Flagship research initiative to support and foster the creation and development of a competitive European quantum technologies industry, as well as the consolidation and expansion of leadership and excellence in European quantum technology research. One of the measures to achieve an accelerated development and uptake has been identified by the Quantum Flagship in its Strategic Research Agenda: The promotion of coordinated, dedicated standardisation and certification efforts.Standardisation is indeed of paramount importance to facilitate the growth of new technologies, and the development of efficient and effective supply chains. The harmonisation of technologies, methodologies, and interfaces enables interoperable products, innovation, and competition, all leading to structuring and hence growth of markets. As quantum technologies mature, the time has come to start thinking about further standardisation needs.This article presents insights on standardisation for quantum technologies from the perspective of the CEN-CENELEC Focus Group on Quantum Technologies (FGQT), which was established in June 2020 to coordinate and support the development of standards relevant for European industry and research.

We investigate the interplay between gravity and the quantum coherence present in the state of a pulse of light propagating in curved spacetime. We first introduce an operational way to distinguish between the overall shift in the pulse wavepacket and its genuine deformation after propagation. We then apply our technique to quantum states of photons that are coherent in the frequency degree of freedom, as well as to states of completely incoherent light. We focus on Gaussian profiles and frequency combs and find that the quantum coherence initially present can enhance the deformation induced by propagation in a curved background. These results further supports the claim that genuine quantum features, such as quantum coherence, can be used to probe the gravitational properties of physical systems. We specialize our techniques to Earth-to-satellite communication setups, where the effects of gravity are weak but can be tested with current satellite technologies., 26 pages, 3 figures

We present explicit expressions for the central piece of a variational method developed by Shi et al. which extends variational wave functions that are efficiently computable on classical computers beyond mean-field to generalized Gaussian states [1]. In particular, we derive iterative analytical expressions for the evaluation of expectation values of products of fermionic creation and annihilation operators in a Grassmann variable-free representation. Using this result we find a closed expression for the energy functional and its gradient of a general fermionic quantum many-body Hamiltonian. We present a simple gradient-descent-based algorithm that can be used as an optimization subroutine in combination with imaginary time evolution, which by construction guarantees a monotonic decrease of the energy in each iteration step. Due to the simplicity of the quantum circuit implementing the variational state Ansatz, the results of the algorithms discussed here and in [1] could serve as an improved, beyond mean-field initial state in quantum computation. [1] Tao Shi, Eugene Demler, and J. Ignacio Cirac. Variational study of fermionic and bosonic systems with non-gaussian states: Theory and applications. Annals of Physics, 390: 245-302, 2018.

Quantum walks have been shown to have a wide range of applications, from artificial intelligence, to photosynthesis, and quantum transport. Quantum stochastic walks (QSWs) generalize this concept to additional non-unitary evolution. In this paper, we propose a trajectory-based quantum simulation protocol to effectively implement a family of discrete-time QSWs in a quantum device. After deriving the protocol for a 2-vertex graph with a single edge, we show how our protocol generalizes to a graph with arbitrary topology and connectivity. The straightforward generalization leads to simple scaling of the protocol to complex graphs. Finally, we show how to simulate a restricted class of continuous-time QSWs by a discrete-time QSW, and how this is amenable to our simulation protocol for discrete-time QSWs.

We study the time evolution of an ideal system composed of two harmonic oscillators coupled through a quadratic Hamiltonian with arbitrary interaction strength. We solve its dynamics analytically by employing tools from symplectic geometry. In particular, we use this result to completely characterize the dynamics of the two oscillators interacting in the ultrastrong coupling regime with additional single-mode squeezing on both oscillators, as well as higher order terms. Furthermore, we compute quantities of interest, such as the average number of excitations and the correlations that are established between the two subsystems due to the evolution. We find that this model predicts a second order phase transition and we compute the critical exponents and the critical value. We also provide an exact decoupling of the time evolution in terms of simple quantum optical operations, which can be used for practical implementations and studies. Finally, we show how our techniques can be extended to include more oscillators and higher order interactions., Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures. I. Fuentes previously published as I. Fuentes-Schuller and I. Fuentes-Guridi

Reaching high-speed, high-fidelity qubit operations requires precise control over the shape of the underlying pulses. For weakly anharmonic systems, such as superconducting transmon qubits, short gates lead to leakage to states outside of the computational subspace. Control pulses designed with open-loop optimal control may reduce such leakage. However, model inaccuracies can severely limit the usability of such pulses. We implemented a closed-loop optimization that simultaneously adapts all control parameters based on measurements of a cost function built from Clifford gates. We directly optimize the amplitude and phase of each sample point of the digitized control pulse. We thereby fully exploit the capabilities of the pulse generation electronics and create a 4.16 ns single-qubit pulse with 99.76 % fidelity and 0.044 % leakage. This is a sevenfold reduction of the leakage rate and a threefold reduction in standard errors of the best DRAG pulse we have calibrated at such short durations on the same system.

We propose a detector of microwave photons which can distinguish the vacuum state, one-photon state, and the states with two or more photons. Its operation is based on the two-photon transition in a biased Josephson junction and detection occurs when it switches from a superconducting to a normal state. We model the detector theoretically. The detector performs with more than 90% success probability in several microseconds. It is sensitive for the 8.2GHz photons. The working frequency could be set at the design stage in the range from about 1GHz to 20GHz., 12 pages, 5 figures

Conversion of vacuum fluctuations into real particles was first predicted by L. Parker considering an expanding universe, followed in S. Hawking's work on black hole radiation. Since their experimental observation is challenging, analogue systems have gained attention in the verification of this concept. Here we propose an experimental set-up consisting of two adjacent piezoelectric semiconducting layers, one of them carrying dynamic quantum dots (DQDs), and the other being p-doped with an attached gate on top, which introduces a space-dependent layer conductivity. The propagation of surface acoustic waves (SAWs) on the latter layer is governed by a wave equation with an effective metric. In the frame of the DQDs, this space- and time-dependent metric possesses a sonic horizon for SAWs and resembles that of a two dimensional non-rotating and uncharged black hole to some extent. The non-thermal steady state of the DQD spin indicates particle creation in form of piezophonons., 9 pages, 2 figures, reinterpration of results and new conclusion

Metamaterial resonant structures made from arrays of superconducting lumped circuit elements can exhibit microwave mode spectra with left-handed dispersion, resulting in a high density of modes in the same frequency range where superconducting qubits are typically operated, as well as a bandgap at lower frequencies that extends down to dc. Using this novel regime for multi-mode circuit quantum electrodynamics, we have performed a series of measurements of such a superconducting metamaterial resonator coupled to a flux-tunable transmon qubit. Through microwave measurements of the metamaterial, we have observed the coupling of the qubit to each of the modes that it passes through. Using a separate readout resonator, we have probed the qubit dispersively and characterized the qubit energy relaxation as a function of frequency, which is strongly affected by the Purcell effect in the presence of the dense mode spectrum. Additionally, we have investigated the ac Stark shift of the qubit as the photon number in the various metamaterial modes is varied. The ability to tailor the dense mode spectrum through the choice of circuit parameters and manipulate the photonic state of the metamaterial through interactions with qubits makes this a promising platform for analog quantum simulation and quantum memories., Comment: 12 pages, 11 figures

A major motivation for building a quantum computer is that it provides a tool to efficiently simulate strongly correlated quantum systems. In this work, we present a detailed roadmap on how to simulate a two-dimensional electron gas---cooled to absolute zero and pierced by a strong transversal magnetic field---on a quantum computer. This system describes the setting of the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect (FQHE), one of the pillars of modern condensed matter theory. We give analytical expressions for the two-body integrals that allow for mixing between $N$ Landau levels at a cutoff $M$ in angular momentum and give gate count estimates for the efficient simulation of the energy spectrum of the Hamiltonian on an error-corrected quantum computer. We then focus on studying efficiently preparable initial states and their overlap with the exact ground state for noisy as well as error-corrected quantum computers. By performing an imaginary time evolution of the covariance matrix we find the generalized Hartree-Fock solution to the many-body problem and study how a multi-reference state expansion affects the state overlap. We perform small-system numerical simulations to study the quality of the two initial state Ans\"{a}tze in the Lowest Landau Level (LLL) approximation., Comment: 30 pages, 8 figures, 4 tables

Common flux qubit readout schemes are qubit dominated, meaning they measure in the energy eigenbasis of the qubit. For various applications meausrements in a basis different from the energy eigenbasis are required. Here we present an indirect measurement protocol, which is detector dominated instead of qubit dominated, yielding a projective measurements in the persistent current basis for arbitrary bias points. We show that with our setup it is possible to perform a quantum nondemolition measurement (QND) in the persistent current basis at all flux bias points with fidelities reaching almost 100%., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures + 5 pages Supplemental

Superconducting metamaterials are a promising resource for quantum information science. In the context of circuit QED, they provide a means to engineer on-chip, novel dispersion relations and a band structure that could ultimately be utilized for generating complex entangled states of quantum circuitry, for quantum reservoir engineering, and as an element for quantum simulation architectures. Here we report on the development and measurement at millikelvin temperatures of a particular type of circuit metamaterial resonator composed of planar superconducting lumped-element reactances in the form of a discrete left-handed transmission line (LHTL). We discuss the details of the design, fabrication, and circuit properties of this system. As well, we provide an extensive characterization of the dense mode spectrum in these metamaterial resonators, which we conducted using both microwave transmission measurements and laser scanning microscopy (LSM). Results are observed to be in good quantitative agreement with numerical simulations and also an analytical model based upon current-voltage relationships for a discrete transmission line. In particular, we demonstrate that the metamaterial mode frequencies, spatial profiles of current and charge densities, and damping due to external loading can be readily modeled and understood, making this system a promising tool for future use in quantum circuit applications and for studies of complex quantum systems.

Quantum simulations is a promising field where a controllable system is used to mimic another system of interest, whose properties one wants to investigate. One of the key issues for such simulations is the ability to control the environment the system couples to, be it to isolate the system or to engineer a tailored environment of interest. One strategy recently put forward for environment engineering is the use of metamaterials with negative index of refraction. Here we build on this concept and propose a circuit-QED simulation of many-body Hamiltonians using superlattice metamaterials. We give a detailed description of a superlattice transmission line coupled to an embedded qubit, and show how this system can be used to simulate the spin-boson model in regimes where analytical and numerical methods usually fail, e.g. the strong coupling regime., 10 pages, 9 figures

The field of quantum information has matured and various protocols implementing a quantum computer are being pursued. Most similar to a classical computer is the circuit model. In 2007 Aharonov et al. showed the equivalence between the circuit model and a quantum annealer, and with this proofed the universality of quantum annealing. Here the system starts in an easily preparable ground state and evolves adiabatically to a final ground state which yields the solution of the computational problem. However, equivalence with the circuit model requires multi-local interactions, i.e. interaction terms involving more than two subsystems. Natural interactions are only two-local, hence the construction or simulation of higher order couplers is indispensable for a universal quantum annealer. Also, four-local couplers allow compact implementation of error correction with the Bacon-Shor code. Four-local interactions can further serve as a tool for basic research. Here we show that in a specific flux qubit coupler design without ancilla qubits, four body interactions are induced by virtual coupler excitations. For specific parameter regimes they are even the leading effect and can be tuned up to the GHz range., 5 pages + 17 pages supplementary, 8 figures

The task of controlling a quantum system under time and bandwidth limitations is made difficult by unwanted excitations of spectrally neighboring energy levels. In this article we review the Derivative Removal by Adiabatic Gate (DRAG) framework. DRAG is a multi-transition variant of counterdiabatic driving, where multiple low-lying gapped states in an adiabatic evolution can be avoided simultaneously, greatly reducing operation times compared to the adiabatic limit. In its essence, the method corresponds to a convergent version of the superadiabatic expansion where multiple counterdiabaticity conditions can be met simultaneously. When transitions are strongly crowded, the system of equations can instead be favorably solved by an average Hamiltonian (Magnus) expansion, suggesting the use of additional sideband control. We give some examples of common systems where DRAG and variants thereof can be applied to improve performance., 7 pages, 2 figures

Quantum walks are a promising framework that can be used to both understand and implement quantum information processing tasks. The quantum stochastic walk is a recently developed framework that combines the concept of a quantum walk with that of a classical random walk, through open system evolution of a quantum system. Quantum stochastic walks have been shown to have applications in as far reaching fields as artificial intelligence. However, there are significant constraints on the kind of open system evolutions that can be realized in a physical experiment. In this work, we discuss the restrictions on the allowed open system evolution, and the physical assumptions underpinning them. We show that general implementations would require the complete solution of the underlying unitary dynamics, and sophisticated reservoir engineering, thus weakening the benefits of experimental investigations.

Quantum computation places very stringent demands on gate fidelities, and experimental implementations require both the controls and the resultant dynamics to conform to hardware-specific constraints. Superconducting qubits present the additional requirement that pulses must have simple parameterizations, so they can be further calibrated in the experiment, to compensate for uncertainties in system parameters. Other quantum technologies, such as sensing, require extremely high fidelities. We present a novel, conceptually simple and easy-to-implement gradient-based optimal control technique named gradient optimization of analytic controls (GOAT), which satisfies all the above requirements, unlike previous approaches. To demonstrate GOAT's capabilities, with emphasis on flexibility and ease of subsequent calibration, we optimize fast coherence-limited pulses for two leading superconducting qubits architectures---flux-tunable transmons and fixed-frequency transmons with tunable couplers.

Robust high-fidelity parity measurment is an important operation in many applications of quantum computing. In this work we show how in a circuit-QED architecture, one can measure parity in a single shot at very high contrast by taking advantage of the nonlinear behavior of a strongly driven microwave cavity coupled to one or multiple qubits. We work in a nonlinear dispersive regime treated in an exact dispersive transformation. We show that appropriate tuning of experimental parameters leads to very high contrast in the cavity and therefore to a high efficiency parity readout with a microwave photon counter or another amplitude detector. These tuning conditions are based on nonlinearity and are hence more robust than previously described linear tuning schemes. In the first part of the paper we show in detail how to achieve this for two qubit parity measurements and extend this to $N$ qubits in the second part of the paper. We also study the QNDness of the protocol., Comment: 13 pages + 5 pages supplementary, 6 figures + 1 figure supplementary

We describe an approach to the integrated control and measurement of a large-scale superconducting multiqubit circuit using a proximal coprocessor based on the Single Flux Quantum (SFQ) digital logic family. Coherent control is realized by irradiating the qubits directly with classical bitstreams derived from optimal control theory. Qubit measurement is performed by a Josephson photon counter, which provides access to the classical result of projective quantum measurement at the millikelvin stage. We analyze the power budget and physical footprint of the SFQ coprocessor and discuss challenges and opportunities associated with this approach., Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures

The cross-resonant gate is an entangling gate for fixed frequency superconducting qubits introduced for untunable qubits. While being simple and extensible, it suffers from long duration and limited fidelity. Using two different optimal control algorithms, we probe the quantum speed limit for a CNOT gate in this system. We show that the ability to approach this limit depends strongly on the ansatz used to describe the optimal control pulse. A piecewise constant ansatz with a single carrier leads to an experimentally feasible pulse shape, shorter than the one currently used in experiments, but that remains relatively far from the speed limit. On the other hand, an ansatz based on the two dominant frequencies involved in the optimal control problem allows to generate an optimal solution more than twice as fast, in under $30$ns. This comes close to the theoretical quantum speed limit, which we estimate at $15$ns for typical circuit-QED parameters, which is more than an order of magnitude faster than current experimental microwave-driven realizations, and more than twice as fast as tunable direct-coupling experimental realizations., Comment: 7 pages, 9 figures

We show that the use of shaped pulses improves the fidelity of a Rydberg blockade two-qubit entangling gate by several orders of magnitude compared to previous protocols based on square pulses or optimal control pulses. Using analytical Derivative Removal by Adiabatic Gate (DRAG) pulses that reduce excitation of primary leakage states and an analytical method of finding the optimal Rydberg blockade we generate Bell states with a fidelity of $F>0.9999$ in a 300 K environment for a gate time of only $50\;{\rm ns}$, which is an order of magnitude faster than previous protocols. These results establish the potential of neutral atom qubits with Rydberg blockade gates for scalable quantum computation., 6 pages, 5 figures

Single flux quantum pulses are a natural candidate for on-chip control of superconducting qubits. We show that they can drive high-fidelity single-qubit rotations---even in leaky transmon qubits---if the pulse sequence is suitably optimized. We achieve this objective by showing that, for these restricted all-digital pulses, genetic algorithms can be made to converge to arbitrarily low error, verified up to a reduction in gate error by 2 orders of magnitude compared to an evenly spaced pulse train. Timing jitter of the pulses is taken into account, exploring the robustness of our optimized sequence. This approach takes us one step further towards on-chip qubit controls., 4 pages, 6 figures

In characterization of quantum systems, adapting measurement settings based on data while it is collected can generally outperform in efficiency conventional measurements that are carried out independently of data. The existing methods for choosing measurement settings adaptively assume that the model, or the number of unknown parameters, is known. We introduce simultaneous adaptive model selection and parameter estimation. We apply our technique for characterization of a superconducting qubit and a bath of incoherent two-level systems, a leading decoherence mechanism in the state-of-the-art superconducting qubits., 9 pages, 5 figures

We present a protocol for interleaved randomized benchmarking of arbitrary quantum gates using Monte Carlo sampling of quantum states. It is generally applicable, including non-Clifford gates while preserving key advantages of randomized benchmarking such as error amplification as well as independence from state preparation and measurement errors. This property is crucial for implementations in many contemporary systems. Although the protocol scales exponentially in the number of qubits, it is superior to direct Monte Carlo sampling of the average gate fidelity in both the total number of experiments by orders of magnitude and savings in classical preprocessing, that are exponential.

Quantum computers are the ideal platform for quantum simulations. Given enough coherent operations and qubits, such machines can be leveraged to simulate strongly correlated materials, where intricate quantum effects give rise to counter-intuitive macroscopic phenomena such as high-temperature superconductivity. In this paper, we provide a gate decomposition and an architecture for a quantum simulator used to simulate the Fermi-Hubbard model in a hybrid variational quantum-classical algorithm. We propose a simple planar implementation-independent layout of qubits that can also be used to simulate more general fermionic systems. By working through a concrete application, we show the gate decomposition used to simulate the Hamiltonian of a cluster of the Fermi-Hubbard model. We briefly analyze the Trotter-Suzuki errors and estimate the scaling properties of the algorithm for more complex applications., 13 pages, 10 figures

Superconducting circuits are macroscopic in size but have generic quantum properties such as quantized energy levels, superposition of states, and entanglement, all of which are more commonly associated with atoms. Superconducting quantum bits (qubits) form the key component of these circuits. Their quantum state is manipulated by using electromagnetic pulses to control the magnetic flux, the electric charge or the phase difference across a Josephson junction (a device with nonlinear inductance and no energy dissipation). As such, superconducting qubits are not only of considerable fundamental interest but also might ultimately form the primitive building blocks of quantum computers.

Constructing a fault-tolerant quantum computer is a daunting task. Given any design, it is possible to determine the maximum error rate of each type of component that can be tolerated while still permitting arbitrarily large-scale quantum computation. It is an underappreciated fact that including an appropriately designed mechanism enabling long-range qubit coupling or transport substantially increases the maximum tolerable error rates of all components. With this thought in mind, we take the superconducting flux qubit coupling mechanism described in PRB 70, 140501 (2004) and extend it to allow approximately 500 MHz coupling of square flux qubits, 50 um a side, at a distance of up to several mm. This mechanism is then used as the basis of two scalable architectures for flux qubits taking into account crosstalk and fault-tolerant considerations such as permitting a universal set of logical gates, parallelism, measurement and initialization, and data mobility., 8 pages, 11 figures

We present a few-parameter ansatz for pulses to implement a broad set of simultaneous single-qubit rotations in frequency-crowded multilevel systems. Specifically, we consider a system of two qutrits whose working and leakage transitions suffer from spectral crowding (detuned by $\delta$). In order to achieve precise controllability, we make use of two driving fields (each having two quadratures) at two different tones to implement arbitrary simultaneous rotations. Expanding the waveforms in terms of Hanning windows, we show how analytic pulses containing smooth and composite-pulse features can easily achieve gate errors less than $10^{-4}$ and considerably outperform known adiabatic techniques. Moreover, we find a generalization of the WahWah method by Schutjens et al. [Phys. Rev. A 88, 052330 (2013)] that allows precise separate single-qubit rotations for all gate times beyond a quantum speed limit. We find in all cases a quantum speed limit slightly below $2\pi/\delta$ for the gate time and show that our pulses are robust against variations in system parameters and filtering due to transfer functions, making them suitable for experimental implementations., Comment: 12 pages, 10 figures

We review a time-dependent version of the Schrieffer-Wolff transformation that accounts for real-time control of system parameters, soon to be rendered possible on a broad basis due to technical progress. The dispersive regime of $N$ multilevel systems coupled to a cavity via a Jaynes-Cummings interaction is extended to the most general case. As a concrete example we rigorously apply the technique to dispersive two-qubit gates in a superconducting architecture, showing that fidelities based on previous models are off by up to $10^{-2}$, which is certainly relevant for high-fidelity gates compatible with fault-tolerant quantum information devices. A closed analytic form for the error depending on the target evolution closes our work., Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures

It is control that turns scientific knowledge into useful technology: in physics and engineering it provides a systematic way for driving a system from a given initial state into a desired target state with minimized expenditure of energy and resources -- as famously applied in the Apollo programme. As one of the cornerstones for enabling quantum technologies, optimal quantum control keeps evolving and expanding into areas as diverse as quantum-enhanced sensing, manipulation of single spins, photons, or atoms, optical spectroscopy, photochemistry, magnetic resonance (spectroscopy as well as medical imaging), quantum information processing and quantum simulation. --- Here state-of-the-art quantum control techniques are reviewed and put into perspective by a consortium uniting expertise in optimal control theory and applications to spectroscopy, imaging, quantum dynamics of closed and open systems. We address key challenges and sketch a roadmap to future developments.

In quantum information processing one strives for quantum nondemolition (QND) measurements, which are least likely to perturb the subsequent evolution of the system. The authors show, however, that common superconducting-qubit readout schemes are in fact not QND. They identify a mechanism that induces an effective coherent rotation of the qubit, which means that such a scheme is QND only in the limit of infinite measurement time. This affects any protocol where measurement is used during computation, and therefore is of immediate importance to contemporary experiments. Thankfully, the authors also explain how to fix the problem.

Randomized benchmarking allows one to efficiently and scalably characterize the average error of a unitary 2-design such as the Clifford group $\mathcal{C}$ on a physical candidate for quantum computation, as long as there are no noncomputational leakage levels in the system. We investigate the effect of leakage errors on randomized benchmarking induced from an additional level per physical qubit and provide a modified protocol that allows us to derive reliable estimates for the error per gate in their presence. We assess the variance of the sequence fidelity corresponding to the number of random sequences needed for valid fidelity estimation. Our protocol allows for gate-dependent error channels without being restricted to perturbations. We show that our protocol is compatible with interleaved randomized benchmarking and expand to benchmarking of arbitrary gates. This setting is relevant for superconducting transmon qubits, among other systems.

We investigate the transient dynamics of a lumped-element oscillator based on a dc superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID). The SQUID is shunted with a capacitor forming a nonlinear oscillator with resonance frequency in the range of several GHz. The resonance frequency is varied by tuning the Josephson inductance of the SQUID with on-chip flux lines. We report measurements of decaying oscillations in the time domain following a brief excitation with a microwave pulse. The nonlinearity of the SQUID oscillator is probed by observing the ringdown response for different excitation amplitudes while the SQUID potential is varied by adjusting the flux bias. Simulations are performed on a model circuit by numerically solving the corresponding Langevin equations incorporating the SQUID potential at the experimental temperature and using parameters obtained from separate measurements characterizing the SQUID oscillator. Simulations are in good agreement with the experimental observations of the ringdowns as a function of applied magnetic flux and pulse amplitude. We observe a crossover between the occurrence of ringdowns close to resonance and adiabatic following at larger detuning from the resonance. We also discuss the occurrence of phase jumps at large amplitude drive. Finally, we briefly outline prospects for a readout scheme for superconducting flux qubits based on the discrimination between ringdown signals for different levels of magnetic flux coupled to the SQUID., 15 pages, 9 figures

We investigate ways to optimize adiabaticity and diabaticity in the Landau-Zener model with non-uniform sweeps. We show how diabaticity can be engineered with a pulse consisting of a linear sweep augmented by an oscillating term. We show that the oscillation leads to jumps in populations whose value can be accurately modeled using a model of multiple, photon-assisted Landau-Zener transitions, which generalizes work by Wubs et al. [New J. Phys. 7, 218 (2005)]. We extend the study on diabaticity using methods derived from optimal control. We also show how to preserve adiabaticity with optimal pulses at limited time, finding a non-uniform quantum speed limit.