Experimental Implementation of Noncyclic and Nonadiabatic Geometric Quantum
Gates in a Superconducting Circuit
Zhuang Ma,1, ∗Jianwen Xu,1, ∗Tao Chen,2, ∗Yu Zhang,1Wen Zheng,1
Dong Lan,1, 3 Zheng-Yuan Xue,2, †Xinsheng Tan,1, 3, ‡and Yang Yu1, 3
1National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures,
School of Physics, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China
2Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Quantum Engineering and Quantum Materials,
and School of Physics and Telecommunication Engineering,
South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510006, China
3Hefei National Laboratory, Hefei 230088, China
(Dated: October 10, 2022)
Quantum gates based on geometric phases possess intrinsic noise-resilience features and therefore
attract much attention. However, the implementations of previous geometric quantum computation
typically require a long pulse time of gates. As a result, their experimental control inevitably suffers
from the cumulative disturbances of systematic errors due to excessive time consumption. Here,
we experimentally implement a set of noncyclic and nonadiabatic geometric quantum gates in a
superconducting circuit, which greatly shortens the gate time. And also, we experimentally verify
that our universal single-qubit geometric gates are more robust to both the Rabi frequency error
and qubit frequency shift-induced error, compared to the conventional dynamical gates, by using the
randomized benchmarking method. Moreover, this scheme can be utilized to construct two-qubit
geometric operations, while the generation of the maximally entangled Bell states is demonstrated.
Therefore, our results provide a promising routine to achieve fast, high-fidelity, and error-resilient
quantum gates in superconducting quantum circuits.
The superconducting quantum circuit is one of the
promising candidates for future large-scale quantum com-
putation [1] due to its high controllability and scalabil-
ity. At this stage, the major obstacle is relatively short
coherence time and experimental perturbations, which
demand speeding up quantum operations and improv-
ing the robustness against errors under the experimental
controls in superconducting quantum circuits. Therefore,
with their intrinsic noise-resilience features, the gates in-
duced by geometric phases [2–4], attainable in supercon-
ducting systems, are highly anticipated.
The geometric phases depend only on the global prop-
erties of their evolution paths, so that they can be applied
to construct the geometric quantum gates against certain
local noises [5]. Adiabatic geometric quantum computa-
tion (AGQC) based on the Berry phase has been pro-
posed [3,6–8] and first experimentally demonstrated in
nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) [4], aiming to realize
high-fidelity and robust quantum gates. However, the
long gate time due to the adiabatic and cyclic evolution
conditions restricts the practical application of AGQC,
especially in quantum systems with limited coherence
time. Some approaches are proposed to overcome this
problem, including the shortcut acceleration to the adi-
abatic evolution [9–12], while these inevitably sacrifice
some robustness and generally increase the control com-
plexity. Recently, nonadiabatic geometric quantum com-
putation (NGQC) has been theoretically proposed and
experimentally implemented based on Abelian [13–21]
and non-Abelian geometric phases [22–31] to break the
limitation of the adiabatic condition. However, to strictly
satisfy the cyclic evolution in NGQC, it usually requires
at least π-pulse time consumption to construct a geomet-
ric gate, so there is still no advantage in operation time
compared to conventional dynamical gates. Meanwhile,
the increase in time consumption will also be accompa-
nied by cumulative disturbances from systematic errors,
making the robust advantage of the geometric gate dis-
plays ambiguous in experiments.
To reduce the gate-operation time and release the re-
striction of the cyclicity in the design of geometric gates
[32], some theoretical schemes based on nonadiabatic but
noncyclic geometric evolution have recently been pro-
posed [33–35]. One of them has been experimentally im-
plemented in a single trapped ultracold 40Ca+ion [36], in
which a special single-qubit geometric gate has demon-
strated its error-resilient feature. But the experimental
verification of short-time and error-resilient features for
a set of universal geometric gates is still lacking, espe-
cially for the simultaneous suppression of different types
of errors.
Here, we experimentally implement the noncyclic and
nonadiabatic (NCNA) geometric quantum computation
in a superconducting quantum circuit. The method we
adopted to construct NCNA geometric gates is reverse
engineering, which purposefully determines the Hamilto-
nian for the system to generate noncyclic geometric evo-
lution paths [37]. In our experiment, a set of universal
and short-time single-qubit NCNA geometric gates in-
cluding [38]π/8 gate (T), Phase gate (S), and Hadamard
gate (H) are realized, and their high fidelities are charac-
terized via randomized benchmarking (RB). Remarkably,
arXiv:2210.03326v1 [quant-ph] 7 Oct 2022