A context-aware gate set tomography: Improving the self-consistent characterization of trapped-ion universal gate sets by leveraging non-Markovianity

To progress in the characterization of noise for quantum computers, gate set tomography (GST) has emerged as a self-consistent protocol that accurately estimates noisy gates, state preparations, and measurements. In its original incarnation, GST improves estimation precision by applying gates sequentially, assuming the noise yields fixed completely-positive and trace-preserving (CPTP) maps independent of prior gate history. This ‘Markovian’ assumption can conflict with experiments, where time-correlated noise may induce non-Markovian dynamics, or slow drifts and cumulative calibration errors introduce context dependence, causing CP-divisible maps to vary with circuit depth. In this work, we address this issue for trapped-ion devices with phonon-mediated two-qubit gates. Using detailed microscopic modeling of high-fidelity light-shift gates, we tailor GST to capture the main source of context dependence: motional degrees of freedom. Rather than invalidating GST, context dependence can be incorporated into the gate-set parametrization, reducing sampling cost. Our results identify a promising research avenue that might be applicable to other platforms where microscopic modeling can be incorporated: the development of a context-aware GST.