Optimizing Rydberg Gates for Logical-Qubit Performance

Robust gate sequences are widely used to reduce the sensitivity of gate operations to experimental imperfections. Typically, the optimization minimizes the average gate error; however, recent work in quantum error correction has demonstrated that the performance of encoded logical qubits is sensitive to not only the average error rate but also the type of errors that occur. Here, we present a family of Rydberg-blockade gates for neutral-atom qubits that are robust against two common major imperfections: intensity inhomogeneity and Doppler shifts. These gates outperform existing gates for moderate or large imperfec-tions. We also consider the logical performance of these gates in the context of an erasure-biased qubit based on metastable 171Yb. In this case, we observe that the robust gates outperform existing gates for even very small values of the imperfections, because they maintain the native large bias toward erasure errors for these qubits. These results significantly reduce the laser stability and atomic temperature requirements to achieve fault-tolerant quantum computing with neutral atoms. The approach of optimizing gates for logical-qubit performance may be applied to other qubit platforms.

Automated summary

Researchers introduced a new gate sequence that is robust against intensity inhomogeneity and Doppler shifts, reducing the sensitivity of gate operations in neutral-atom qubits to experimental imperfections. The gates outperform existing ones for moderate or large imperfections, and show improved performance even for very small imperfections when applied to erasure-biased qubits based on metastable 171Yb.