Quantum computing is currently hindered by hardware noise. We present a freestyle superconducting pulse optimization method, incorporating two-qubit channels, which enhances flexibility,execution speed, and noise resilience. A minimal 0.22 ns pulse is shown to determine the H2 groundstate to within chemical accuracy upon real-hardware, approaching the quantum speed limit. Similarly, a pulse significantly shorter than circuit-based counterparts is found for the LiH molecule, attaining state-of-the-art accuracy. The method is general and can potentially accelerate performance across various quantum computing components and hardware.
Quantum computers are a leading platform for the simulation of many-body physics. This task has been recently facilitated by the possibility to program directly the time-dependent pulsessent to the computer. Here, we use this feature to simulate quantum lattice models with long-range hopping. Our approach is based on an exact mapping between periodically driven quantum systems and one-dimensional lattices in the synthetic Floquet direction. By engineering a periodic drive with a power-law spectrum, we simulate a lattice with long-range hopping, whose decay exponent is freely tunable. We propose and realize experimentally two protocols to probe the long tails of the Floquet eigenfunctions and to identify a scaling transition between weak and strong long-range couplings. Our work offers a useful benchmark of pulse engineering and opens the route towards quantum simulations of rich nonequilibrium effects.