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Echoed Cross-Resonance gate

Identifier Operator Example statement
ECR \(ECR\) ECR q[0], q[1]

Description

The echoed cross-resonance, or ECR, gate is a two-qubit gate. It is an entangling two-qubit gate commonly used in superconducting QPUs, such as IBM quantum systems.

Properties

  • Perfect Entangler (maximally entangles specific product states);
  • Maximum Entangling Power over all uniformly random product states;
  • Ising gate.

Representation

\[\begin{align} ECR &= \frac{1}{\sqrt{2}} \left(\begin{matrix} 0 & 0 & 1 & i \\ 0 & 0 & i & 1 \\ 1 & -i & 0 & 0 \\ -i & 1 & 0 & 0 \end{matrix}\right) \end{align}\]

Operation examples

Standard basis

\[\begin{align} ECR\,|00\rangle &= \tfrac{1}{\sqrt{2}} |01\rangle - \tfrac{i}{\sqrt{2}} \,|11\rangle \\ \\ ECR\,|01\rangle &= \tfrac{1}{\sqrt{2}} |00\rangle + \tfrac{i}{\sqrt{2}} \,|10\rangle \\ \\ ECR\,|10\rangle &= -\tfrac{i}{\sqrt{2}} \,|01\rangle + \tfrac{1}{\sqrt{2}} |11\rangle \\ \\ ECR\,|11\rangle &= \tfrac{i}{\sqrt{2}} \,|00\rangle + \tfrac{1}{\sqrt{2}} |10\rangle \\ \end{align}\]

Qubit state ordering convention and matrix representation

Note that qubits in a ket are ordered with qubit indices decreasing from left to right, i.e.,

\[|\psi\rangle = \sum c_i~|q_nq_{n-1}~...q_1q_0\rangle_i\]

Note that for matrices a reversed basis ordering convention is adopted, as is done in most textbooks. For instance, in the case of a two-qubit control gate, the matrix is represented such that \(q_0\) is the control qubit and \(q_1\) is the target qubit; the state on which the matrix is applied should then effectively be written as \(|q_0\rangle \otimes |q_1\rangle\).