Time-optimal Qubit Reset via Environmental Spectral Structure

Abstract

Fast qubit reset is essential for qubit reuse in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum computing era, yet it conflicts with the weak decoherence required for high-fidelity computation. We solve the time-optimal reset problem for a frequency-tunable qubit coupled to a structural environment under realistic spectral and control constraints. The optimal strategy consists of a switch--restore--switch sequence, where the qubit is moved from a low-decoherence computational configuration to a high-decoherence restoring configuration and then returned for reuse. For superconducting qubits in four representative environments, this strategy reduces the reset time from typically $\gtrsim\SI{100}{\nano\second}$ to $\SI{20}{\nano\second}$, about $40\%$ of a typical two-qubit gate time, while achieving a reset precision of $10^{-5}$. Our results identify environmental spectral structure as a practical resource for rapid, high-fidelity qubit reset and provide a design principle for qubit reuse on qubit-limited processors.