Niril George

My PhD research focuses on making superconducting quantum computers more reliable so they can support fault-tolerant quantum computation. Current superconducting qubits suffer from decoherence, control errors, crosstalk, leakage, and parameter drift, which keep physical error rates too high for effective quantum error correction. In this project, I use a framework called Robust Optimal Control (ROC) to design microwave and flux-control pulses that maintain high gate fidelity even when the hardware parameters are uncertain and the environment is noisy. I apply ROC to both single- and two-qubit gates (including cross-resonance and flux-tunable entangling gates) and study their performance through analytical modeling, large-scale simulations, and experiments on state-of-the-art superconducting processors. The long-term goal is to integrate these robust gates with surface-code error correction and magic-state protocols to reduce resource overheads and move closer to scalable, fault-tolerant quantum computing.