Pulse-level Scheduling of Quantum Circuits for Neutral-Atom Devices

We show how a pulse-level implementation of the multi-qubit gates in neutral-atom device architectures allows for the simultaneous execution of single- and multi-qubit gates acting on overlapping sets of qubits, in a mechanism we name absorption. With absorption as a foundation, we present an algorithm to schedule the execution of a quantum circuit as a pulse sequence on a neutral-atom device with a single channel for single- and multi-qubit gate execution. For any quantum circuit of practical relevance, we observe that the algorithm results in an optimal utilization of the available resources that cannot be surpassed by a different scheduling strategy. Our benchmarks against a custom scheduler attempting to maximize parallelization at the gate level show the time gained by the pulse-level scheduler is proportional to the depth and is most pronounced for quantum circuits with fewer qubits.