Entangling operations are among the most important primitive gates employed in quantum computing and it is crucial to ensure high-fidelity implementations as systems are scaled up. We experimentally realize and characterize a simple scheme to minimize errors in entangling operations related to the residual excitation of mediating bosonic oscillator modes that both improves gate-robustness and provides scaling benefits in larger systems. The technique employs discrete phase shifts in the control field driving the gate operation, determined either analytically or numerically, to ensure all modes are de-excited at arbitrary user-defined times. We demonstrate an average gate fidelity of 99.4(2)% across a wide range of parameters in a system of 171 Yb + trapped ion qubits, and observe a reduction of gate error in the presence of common experimental error sources. Our approach provides a unified framework to achieve robustness against both static and time-varying laser amplitude and frequency detuning errors. We verify these capabilities through systemidentification experiments revealing improvements in error-susceptibility achieved in phase-modulated gates.The ability to perform robust, high fidelity entangling gates in multi-qubit systems is a key requirement for realizing scalable quantum information processing 1 . In several hardware architectures, qubits are entangled through shared bosonic oscillator modes via an interaction that is moderated by an external driving field. The Mølmer-Sørensen (MS) gate in trapped ions 2-4 and the resonator-induced phase gate in superconducting circuits 5-7 are both of this type. In addition, interactions simultaneously employing multiple bosonic modes have been explored to improve gate fidelities 8 and probe novel types of interactions 9 in superconducting circuits.A major source of error for oscillator-mediated gates is residual qubit-oscillator entanglement at the end of the operation 10 . This detrimental effect can arise due to the presence of quasi-static or time-varying noise on the driving field, slow drifts in experimental parameters such as the qubit and oscillator frequencies, or the presence of spectator modes that are not properly accounted for in the gate construction. In trapped ion systems, various schemes have been demonstrated that minimize this residual coupling 11-15 , with some also incorporating the ability to simultaneously decouple from multiple modes 16-21 . Their common feature is a temporal modulation of the driving field, modifying the trajectories of the joint qubit-oscillator states in each oscillator's phase space.In this work, we experimentally demonstrate a new class of phase-modulated (ΦM) entangling gates using trapped ions in the presence of multi-mode motional spectra. Specifically, we implement an MS-type interaca) These three authors contributed equally to this work. b) Current address: Fachrichtung Physik, Universität des Saarlandes, tion and employ discrete phase shifts of the driving field to suppress dominant gate errors. Using both an ana...

Effectively manipulating quantum computing hardware in the presence of imperfect devices and control systems is a central challenge in realizing useful quantum computers. Susceptibility to noise in particular limits the performance and algorithmic capabilities experienced by end users. Fortunately, in both the NISQ era and beyond, quantum control enables the efficient execution of quantum logic operations and quantum algorithms exhibiting robustness to errors, without the need for complex logical encoding. In this manuscript we introduce the first commercial-grade software tools for the application and integration of quantum control in quantum computing research from Q-CTRL, serving the needs of hardware R&D teams, algorithm developers, and end users. We survey quantum control and its role in combating noise and instability in near-term devices; our primary focus is on quantum firmware, the low-level software solutions designed to enhance the stability of quantum computational hardware at the physical layer. We explain the benefits of quantum firmware not only in error suppression, but also in simplifying higher-level compilation protocols and enhancing the efficiency of quantum error correction. Following this exposition, we provide an overview of Q-CTRL's classical software tools for creating and deploying optimized quantum control solutions at various layers of the quantum computing software stack. We describe our software architecture leveraging both high-performance distributed cloud computation and local custom integration into hardware systems, and explain how key functionality is integrable with other software packages and quantum programming languages. Our presentation includes a detailed technical overview of central product features including a multidimensional control-optimization engine, engineering-inspired filter functions for high-dimensional Hilbert spaces, and a new approach to noise characterization. Finally, we present a series of case studies demonstrating the utility of quantum control solutions derived from these tools in improving the performance of trapped-ion and superconducting quantum computer hardware.

Growth in the capabilities of quantum information hardware mandates access to techniques for performance verification that function under realistic laboratory conditions. Here we experimentally characterise the impact of common temporally correlated noise processes on both randomised benchmarking (RB) and gate-set tomography (GST). Our analysis highlights the role of sequence structure in enhancing or suppressing the sensitivity of quantum verification protocols to either slowly or rapidly varying noise, which we treat in the limiting cases of quasi-DC miscalibration and white noise power spectra. We perform experiments with a single trapped 171 Yb + ion-qubit and inject engineered noise /σ z ð Þto probe protocol performance. Experiments on RB validate predictions that measured fidelities over sequences are described by a gamma distribution varying between approximately Gaussian, and a broad, highly skewed distribution for rapidly and slowly varying noise, respectively. Similarly we find a strong gate set dependence of default experimental GST procedures in the presence of correlated errors, leading to significant deviations between estimated and calculated diamond distances in the presence of correlatedσ z errors. Numerical simulations demonstrate that expansion of the gate set to include negative rotations can suppress these discrepancies and increase reported diamond distances by orders of magnitude for the same error processes. Similar effects do not occur for correlatedσ x orσ y errors or depolarising noise processes, highlighting the impact of the critical interplay of selected gate set and the gauge optimisation process on the meaning of the reported diamond norm in correlated noise environments.