Characterizing gate operations near the sweet spot of an exchange-only qubit

Abstract

Optimal working points or "sweet spots" have arisen as an important tool for mitigating charge noise in quantum dot logical spin qubits. The exchange-only qubit provides an ideal system for studying this effect because $Z$ rotations are performed directly at the sweet spot, while $X$ rotations are not. Here for the first time we quantify the ability of the sweet spot to mitigate charge noise by treating $X$ and $Z$ rotations on an equal footing. Specifically, we optimize $X$ rotations and determine an upper bound on their fidelity. We find that sweet spots offer a fidelity improvement factor of at least 20 for typical GaAs devices, and more for Si devices.