Single-step high-fidelity three-qubit gates by anisotropic chiral interactions

Abstract: Direct multi-qubit gates are becoming critical to facilitate quantum computations in near-term devices by reducing the gate counts and circuit depth. Here, we demonstrate that fast and high fidelity three-qubit gates can be realized in a single step by leveraging small anisotropic and chiral three-qubit interactions. These ingredients naturally arise in state-of-the-art spin-based quantum hardware through a combination of spin-orbit interactions and orbital magnetic fields. These interactions resolve the key synchronization issues inherent in protocols relying solely on two-qubit couplings, which significantly limit gate fidelity. We confirm with numerical simulations that our single-step three-qubit gate can outperform existing protocols, potentially achieving infidelity $\leq 10^{-4}$ in 80-100 ns under current experimental conditions. To further benchmark its performance, we also propose an alternative composite three-qubit gate sequence based on anisotropic two-qubit interactions with built-in echo sequence and show that the single-step protocol can outperform it, making it highly suitable for near-term quantum processors.