Implementation of the XY interaction family by calibration of a single pulse

Near-term applications of quantum information processors will rely on optimized circuit implementations to minimize gate depth and therefore mitigate the impact of errors in noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers. More expressive gate sets can significantly reduce the gate depth of generic circuits. Similarly, structured algorithms can benefit from a gate set that more directly matches the symmetries of the problem. The XY interaction generates a family of gates that provides expressiveness well tailored to quantum chemistry as well as to combinatorial optimization problems; while also offering reductions in circuit depth for more generic circuits. Here we implement the full family of XY entangling gates in a transmon-based superconducting qubit architecture using a composite pulse scheme that requires calibration of only a single gate and maintains constant gate time for all members of the family. This allows us to maintain a high fidelity implementation of the gate across all entangling angles. The average fidelity of gates sampled from this family ranges from 95.67 ± 0.60% to 99.01 ± 0.15%, with a median fidelity of 97.35 ± 0.17%, which approaches the coherence-limited gate fidelity of the qubit pair.