Characterizing errors on qubit operations via iterative randomized benchmarking

With improved gate calibrations reducing unitary errors, we achieve a benchmarked single-qubit gate fidelity of 0.9995±0.0002 with superconducting qubits in a circuit quantum electrodynamics system. We present a method for distinguishing between unitary and nonunitary errors in quantum gates by interleaving repetitions of a target gate within a randomized benchmarking sequence. The benchmarking fidelity decays quadratically with the number of interleaved gates for unitary errors but linearly for nonunitary errors, allowing us to separate systematic coherent errors from decoherent effects. With this protocol, we show that the fidelity of the gates is not limited by unitary errors.