Error compensation of single-qubit gates in a surface-electrode ion trap using composite pulses

The fidelity of laser-driven quantum logic operations on trapped ion qubits tend to be lower than microwave-driven logic operations due to the difficulty of stabilizing the driving fields at the ion location. Through stabilization of the driving optical fields and use of composite pulse sequences, we demonstrate high-fidelity single-qubit gates for the hyperfine qubit of a ¹⁷¹Yb⁺ ion trapped in a microfabricated surface-electrode ion trap. Gate error is characterized using a randomized benchmarking protocol and an average error per randomized Clifford group gate of 3.6(3)×10^-4 is measured. We also report experimental realization of palindromic pulse sequences that scale efficiently in sequence length.