Robust calibration of a universal single-qubit gate set via robust phase estimation

Robust calibration of a universal single-qubit gate set via robust phase estimation. Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. An important step in building a quantum computer is calibrating experimentally implemented quantum gates to produce operations that are close to ideal unitaries. The calibration step involves estimating the systematic errors in gates and then using controls to correct the implementation. Quantum process tomography is a standard technique for estimating these errors but is both time consuming (when one wants to learn only a few key parameters) and usually inaccurate without resources such as perfect state preparation and measurement, which might not be available. With the goal of efficiently and accurately estimating specific errors using minimal resources, we develop a parameter estimation technique, which can gauge key systematic parameters (specifically, amplitude and off-resonance errors) in a universal single-qubit gate set with provable robustness and efficiency. In particular, our estimates achieve the optimal efficiency, Heisenberg scaling, and do so without entanglement and entirely within a single-qubit Hilbert space. Our main theorem making this possible is a robust version of the phase estimation procedure of Higgins et al.