Leakage reduction in fast superconducting qubit gates via optimal control

Reaching high speed, high fidelity qubit operations requires precise control over the shape of the underlying pulses. For weakly anharmonic systems, such as superconducting transmon qubits, short gates lead to leakage to states outside of the computational subspace. Control pulses designed with open-loop optimal control may reduce such leakage. However, model inaccuracies can severely limit the usability of such pulses. We implemented a closed-loop optimization that simultaneously adapts all control parameters based on measurements of a cost function built from Clifford gates. By parameterizing pulses with a piecewise-constant representation that matches the capabilities of the control hardware we create a 4.16 ns single-qubit pulse with 99.76% fidelity and 0.044% leakage. This is a seven-fold reduction of the leakage rate of the best DRAG pulse we have calibrated at such short durations on the same system.