Frank Mueller

Synthesizing Compound Pulse Gadgets for Hamiltonian Simulation on Trapped-Ion Platforms

Ria Patel, Masoud Hakimi Heris, Yuan Liu, Frank Mueller

Abstract

Standard gate-level transpilation introduces significant physical noise and overhead for high-precision quantum algorithms, such as the Quantum Singular Value Transformation (QSVT), on near-term trapped-ion hardware. Current compilers treat quantum operations as discrete units, forcing the physical control layer to execute highly fragmented laser pulses. To address this hardware-software disconnect, this work introduces a holistic pulse synthesis strategy that bypasses discrete gate-stitching to compile algorithms directly into continuous compound pulse gadgets. As a proof-of-concept, we target Hamiltonian simulation of the $H_2$ molecule, block-encoding the problem into a QSVT circuit to approximate the time-evolution operator $U = e^{-i H t}$ across 3 computational ions (2 system, 1 ancilla). We utilize the Gradient Ascent Pulse Engineering (GRAPE) algorithm to generate these compound gadgets and evaluate our methodology using noisy Lindblad master equation simulations. Preliminary observations indicate that the proposed strategy achieves significant temporal compression, reducing the total pulse schedule duration compared to standard compilers. Furthermore, synthesizing operations holistically eliminates the control-layer latency associated with discrete pulse lookup overhead. By streamlining the physical control schedule, this methodology offers a promising pathway to execute operations faster, highlighting the potential for compound gadgets to increase the computational depth achievable within fundamental $T_2$ decoherence limits.

HyPulse: A Pulse Synthesis Framework for Hybrid Qubit-Oscillator Gates on Trapped-Ion Platform

Masoud Hakimi Heris [1], Yuan Liu [1,2,3], Frank Mueller [2]

Abstract

As hybrid qubit-oscillator algorithm development and trapped-ion hardware demonstrations advance in parallel, there is a lack of a compilation layer connecting the two at the pulse level in the vertical software stack. While qubit gate control and pulse synthesis are well-established, the translation of hybrid qubit-oscillator primitives to the pulse level has not been systematically addressed. This gap is further compounded by the inherently continuous parametric nature of such gates. Each distinct parameter value defines a physically unique operation requiring independent pulse optimization, making static pre-compilation strategies inapplicable. To fill this gap, we present HyPulse, a hardware-aware pulse synthesis and generation framework, which contributes a two-phase architecture decoupling pulse discovery from circuit assembly. An offline optimization engine populates a content-addressed cache of high-fidelity primitives: If a pulse for a given gate, parameter, and device specification already exists in the library, it is retrieved instantly; otherwise the optimizer synthesizes, hashes, and caches it automatically. An online assembler then constructs circuit-specific pulse programs ready to drive trapped-ion hardware control systems via DAX/ARTIQ (Duke) and JaqalPaw/QSCOUT (Sandia), trapped-ion pulse execution backends.

CONQURE: A Co-Execution Environment for Quantum and Classical Resources

Atulya Mahesh [1], Swastik Mittal [1], Frank Mueller [1]

Abstract

Cutting edge classical computing today relies on a combination of CPU-based computing with a strong reliance on accelerators. In particular, high-performance computing (HPC) and machine learning (ML) rely heavily on acceleration via GPUs for numerical kernels. In the future, acceleration via quantum devices may complement GPUs for kernels where algorithms provide quantum advantage, i.e., significant speedups over classical algorithms. Computing with quantum kernels mapped onto quantum processing units (QPUs) requires seamless integration into HPC and ML. However, quantum offloading onto HPC/cloud lacks open-source software infrastructure. For classical algorithms, parallelization standards, such as OpenMP, MPI, or CUDA exist. In contrast, a lack of quantum abstractions currently limits the adoption of quantum acceleration in practical applications creating a gap between quantum algorithm development and practical HPC integration. Such integration needs to extend to efficient quantum offloading of kernels, which further requires scheduling of quantum resources, control of QPU kernel execution, tracking of QPU results, providing results to classical calling contexts and coordination with HPC scheduling. This work proposes CONQURE, a co-execution environment for quantum and classical resources. CONQURE is a fully open-source cloud queue framework that presents a novel modular scheduling framework allowing users to offload OpenMP quantum kernels to QPUs as quantum circuits, to relay results back to calling contexts in classical computing, and to schedule quantum resources via our CONQURE API. We show our API has a low overhead averaging 12.7ms in our tests, and we demonstrate functionality on an ion-trap device. Our OpenMP extension enables the parallelization of VQE runs with a 3.1X reduction in runtime.