Optimizing for periodicity: a model-independent approach to flux crosstalk calibration for superconducting circuits

  1. X. Dai,
  2. R. Trappen,
  3. R. Yang,
  4. S. M. Disseler,
  5. J. I. Basham,
  6. J. Gibson,
  7. A. J. Melville,
  8. B. M. Niedzielski,
  9. R. Das,
  10. D. K. Kim,
  11. J.L. Yoder,
  12. S. J. Weber,
  13. C. F. Hirjibehedin,
  14. D. A. Lidar,
  15. and A. Lupascu
Flux tunability is an important engineering resource for superconducting circuits. Large-scale quantum computers based on flux-tunable superconducting circuits face the problem of flux
crosstalk, which needs to be accurately calibrated to realize high-fidelity quantum operations. Typical calibration methods either assume that circuit elements can be effectively decoupled and simple models can be applied, or require a large amount of data. Such methods become ineffective as the system size increases and circuit interactions become stronger. Here we propose a new method for calibrating flux crosstalk, which is independent of the underlying circuit model. Using the fundamental property that superconducting circuits respond periodically to external fluxes, crosstalk calibration of N flux channels can be treated as N independent optimization problems, with the objective functions being the periodicity of a measured signal depending on the compensation parameters. We demonstrate this method on a small-scale quantum annealing circuit based on superconducting flux qubits, achieving comparable accuracy with previous methods. We also show that the objective function usually has a nearly convex landscape, allowing efficient optimization.