Binary Optimal Control Of Single-Flux-Quantum Pulse Sequences

Abstract: We introduce a binary, relaxed gradient, trust-region method for optimizing pulse sequences for single flux quanta (SFQ) control of a quantum computer. The pulse sequences are optimized with the goal of realizing unitary gate transformations. Each pulse has a fixed amplitude and duration. We model this process as an binary optimal control problem, constrained by Schr\"{o}dinger's equation, where the binary variables indicate whether each pulse is on or off. We introduce a first-order trust-region method, which takes advantage of a relaxed gradient to determine an optimal pulse sequence that minimizes the gate infidelity, while also suppressing leakage to higher energy levels. The proposed algorithm has a computational complexity of ${\cal O}(p\log(p)$, where $p$ is the number of pulses in the sequence. We present numerical results for the H and X gates, where the optimized pulse sequences give gate fidelity's better than $99.9\%$, in $\approx 25$ trust-region iterations.