Autler-townes energy-level engineering for high-quality all-microwave qubit gate

Abstract

High-fidelity entangling gates are essential for realizing large-scale fault-tolerant superconducting quantum computing, yet existing approaches are limited: frequency-tuning techniques induce decoherence, while all-microwave-driven schemes suffer the trade-off between gate speed and leakage rate. Here, we introduce an energy-level engineering technique that employs the Autler-Townes effect to manipulate the nonlinearity of qubits without perturbing the computational subspace or degrading coherence time. This approach enables an experimentally validated, fast (97 ns) and high-fidelity (99.40(9)%) CZ gate, where error analysis reveals that gate errors arise mainly from static decoherence. The scheme facilitates fast, high-quality all-microwave gate operations with a simple topology and can be applied across various quantum platforms.