Direct pulse level compilation of arbitrary quantum logic gates on superconducting qutrits

In principle, optimal control techniques can be used to implement any complex many-body unitary on a quantum device without the need to decompose the operation into primitive gates. In addition, the resulting operation can be achieved in a shorter time and with less error than compilation to a fixed gate set. Here, we demonstrate the practical utility of integrating optimal control techniques directly into a quantum compiler toolchain. We will present experimental results for pulse-level compilation of randomly generated unitaries implemented with optimal control on superconducting qutrits. We demonstrate high-fidelity evolution on two different experimental platforms with different qudit architectures, the LLNL QuDIT testbed and Rigetti Aspen-11. Our work shows that optimal control can practically be used to enable more detailed and accurate simulations of complicated quantum phenomena than is possible with the fixed gate set approach on current quantum hardware. This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. LLNL-ABS-841474.