Composite pulse sequences, which produce arbitrary predefined rotations of a qubit on the Bloch sphere, are presented. The composite sequences contain up to 17 pulses and can compensate up to 8 orders of experimental errors in the pulse amplitude and the pulse duration. Composite sequences for three basic quantum gates, X (not), Hadamard and arbitrary rotation, are derived. Three classes of composite sequences are presented: one symmetric and two asymmetric. They contain as their lowest members two well-known composite sequences: the three-pulse symmetric SCROFULOUS pulse and the four-pulse asymmetric BB1 pulse, which compensate first- and second-order errors, respectively. The shorter sequences are derived analytically, and the longer ones numerically (instead by nesting and concatenation, as usually done hitherto). Consequently, the composite sequences derived here match or outperform the existing ones in terms of either speed or accuracy, or both. For example, we derive a second-order composite sequence, which is faster (by about 13%) than the famous BB1 sequence. For higher-order sequences, the speedup becomes much more pronounced. This is important for quantum information processing as the sequences derived here provide more options for finding the sweet spot between ultrahigh fidelity and high speed.

• Received 29 December 2020
• Accepted 29 June 2021

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.104.012609