  We study the performance of holonomic quantum gates, driven by lasers, under
the effect of a dissipative environment modeled as a thermal bath of
oscillators. We show how to enhance the performance of the gates by suitable
choice of the loop in the manifold of the controllable parameters of the laser.
For a simplified, albeit realistic model, we find the surprising result that
for a long time evolution the performance of the gate (properly estimated in
terms of average fidelity) increases. On the basis of this result, we compare
holonomic gates with the so-called stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP)
gates.
