What is the proper area for a Gaussian Pulse so it will be able to perform a rotation of pi on a qubit?

Question

with pulse.build(backend, name='hadamard') as h_q0:
    pulse.play(Gaussian(duration=1289, amp=0.99, sigma=32), pulse.drive_channel(0))
   
    reg = pulse.measure(qubit)
    
   
h_q0.draw()

Above is code that I have for a Gaussian Pulse. How would you change the duration, amp, and sigma parameters, so that the Gaussian Pulse would have the proper area for conducting an X gate on a qubit?

Answer 1

There is a dedicated section about this on Qiskit Textbook.

A quick summary:

1. pick a duration and a sigma and make them constant.
2. apply the Gaussian pulse with several different amplitudes.
3. recover the results that should look like a sinusoid (Rabi experiment).
4. the amplitude you are searching for is the period of the sinusoid divided by 2.

I cannot possibly include all the details from the Qiskit Textbook in this answer, but the process above is described and illustrated there.

Note also that any pulse duration have to be a multiple of 16 dt. The Gaussian pulse you are using in your question will be rejected by the hardware.