Geometric phase gates with adiabatic control in electron spin resonance

Abstract

High-fidelity quantum operations are a key requirement for fault-tolerant quantum information processing. Manipulation of electron spins is usually achieved with time-dependent microwave fields. In contrast to the conventional dynamic approach, adiabatic geometric phase operations are expected to be less sensitive to certain kinds of noise and field inhomogeneities. Here, we introduce an adiabatic geometric phase gate for the electron spin. Benchmarking it against existing dynamic and nonadiabatic geometric gates through simulations and experiments, we show that it is indeed inherently robust against inhomogeneity in the applied microwave field strength. While only little advantage is offered over error-correcting composite pulses for modest inhomogeneities $\ensuremath{\lesssim}10%$, the adiabatic approach reveals its potential for situations where field inhomogeneities are unavoidably large.