Robust gate sequences are widely used to reduce the sensitivity of gate
operations to experimental imperfections. Typically, the optimization minimizes
the average gate error, however, recent work in quantum error correction has
demonstrated that the performance of encoded logical qubits is sensitive to not
only the average error rate, but also the type of errors that occur. Here, we
present a family of Rydberg blockade gates for neutral atom qubits that are
robust against two common, major imperfections: intensity inhomogeneity and
Doppler shifts. These gates outperform existing gates for moderate or large
imperfections. We also consider the logical performance of these gates in the
context of an erasure-biased qubit based on metastable  171Yb. In this
case, we observe that the robust gates outperform existing gates for even very
small values of the imperfections, because they maintain the native large bias
towards erasure errors for these qubits. These results significantly reduce the
laser stability and atomic temperature requirements to achieve fault-tolerant
quantum computing with neutral atoms. The approach of optimizing gates for
logical qubit performance may be applied to other qubit platforms.Comment: v3: Added discussion of AC-Stark shifts; v2: Updated reference