Protocol for a resonantly driven three-qubit Toffoli gate with silicon spin qubits

Abstract

The three-qubit Toffoli gate plays an important role in quantum error correction and complex quantum algorithms such as Shor's factoring algorithm, motivating the search for efficient implementations of this gate. Here we introduce a Toffoli gate suitable for exchange-coupled electron spin qubits in silicon quantum dot arrays. Our protocol is a natural extension of a previously demonstrated resonantly driven CNOT gate for silicon spin qubits. It is based on a single exchange pulse combined with a resonant microwave drive, with an operation time on the order of 100 ns and fidelity exceeding 99%. We analyze the impact of calibration errors and 1/f noise on the gate fidelity and compare the gate performance to Toffoli gates synthesized from two-qubit gates. Our approach is readily generalized to other controlled three-qubit gates such as the Deutsch and Fredkin gates.