Abstract
We carry out a systematic analysis of a pair of coupled qubits, each of which is subject to its own dissipative environment, and argue that a combination of the inter-qubit couplings which provides for the lowest possible decoherence rates corresponds to the incidence of a double spectral degeneracy in the two-qubit system. We support this general argument by the results of of an evolutionary genetic algorithm which can also be used for optimizing time-dependent processes (gates) and their sequences that implement various quantum computing protocols.