State leakage during fast decay and control of a superconducting transmon qubit

Superconducting Josephson junction qubits constitute the main current technology for many applications, including scalable quantum computers and thermal devices. Theoretical modeling of such systems is usually done within the two-level approximation. However, accurate theoretical modeling requires taking into account the influence of the higher excited states without limiting the system to the two-level qubit subspace. Here, we study the dynamics and control of a superconducting transmon using the numerically exact stochastic Liouville–von Neumann equation approach. We focus on the role of state leakage from the ideal two-level subspace for bath induced decay and single-qubit gate operations. We find significant short-time state leakage due to the strong coupling to the bath. We quantify the leakage errors in single-qubit gates and demonstrate their suppression with derivative removal adiabatic gates (DRAG) control for a five-level transmon in the presence of decoherence. Our results predict the limits of accuracy of the two-level approximation and possible intrinsic constraints in qubit dynamics and control for an experimentally relevant parameter set.