I am going to post here all newly submitted articles on the arXiv related to superconducting circuits. If your article has been accidentally forgotten, feel free to contact me
08
Jul
2020
Integration of selectively grown topological insulator nanoribbons in superconducting quantum circuits
We report on the precise integration of nm-scale topological insulator Josephson junctions into mm-scale superconducting quantum circuits via selective area epitaxy and local stencil
lithography. By studying dielectric losses of superconducting microwave resonators fabricated on top of our selective area growth mask, we verify the compatibility of this in situ technique with microwave applications. We probe the microwave response of on-chip microwave cavities coupled to topological insulator-shunted superconducting qubit devices and observe a power dependence that indicates nonlinear qubit behaviour. Our method enables integration of complex networks of topological insulator nanostructures into superconducting circuits, paving the way for both novel voltage-controlled Josephson and topological qubits.
06
Jul
2020
Reducing unitary and spectator errors in cross resonance with optimized rotary echoes
We present an improvement to the cross resonance gate realized with the addition of resonant, target rotary pulses. These pulses, applied directly to the target qubit, are simultaneous
to and in phase with the echoed cross resonance pulses. Using specialized Hamiltonian error amplifying tomography, we confirm a reduction of error terms with target rotary — directly translating to improved two-qubit gate fidelity. Beyond improvement in the control-target subspace, the target rotary reduces entanglement between target and target spectators caused by residual quantum interactions. We further characterize multi-qubit performance improvement enabled by target rotary pulsing using unitarity benchmarking and quantum volume measurements, achieving a new record quantum volume for a superconducting qubit system.
03
Jul
2020
Surpassing the resistance quantum with a geometric superinductor
The superconducting circuit community has recently discovered the promising potential of superinductors. These circuit elements have a characteristic impedance exceeding the resistance
quantum RQ≈6.45 kΩ which leads to a suppression of ground state charge fluctuations. Applications include the realization of hardware protected qubits for fault tolerant quantum computing, improved coupling to small dipole moment objects and defining a new quantum metrology standard for the ampere. In this work we refute the widespread notion that superinductors can only be implemented based on kinetic inductance, i.e. using disordered superconductors or Josephson junction arrays. We present modeling, fabrication and characterization of 104 planar aluminum coil resonators with a characteristic impedance up to 30.9 kΩ at 5.6 GHz and a capacitance down to ≤1 fF, with low-loss and a power handling reaching 108 intra-cavity photons. Geometric superinductors are free of uncontrolled tunneling events and offer high reproducibility, linearity and the ability to couple magnetically – properties that significantly broaden the scope of future quantum circuits.
A switching approach for perfect state transfer over a scalable and routing enabled network architecture with superconducting qubits
We propose a hypercube switching architecture for the perfect state transfer (PST) where we prove that it is always possible to find an induced hypercube in any given hypercube of any
dimension such that PST can be performed between any two given vertices of the original hypercube. We then generalise this switching scheme over arbitrary number of qubits where also this routing feature of PST between any two vertices is possible. It is shown that this is optimal and scalable architecture for quantum computing with the feature of routing. This allows for a scalable and growing network of qubits. We demonstrate this switching scheme to be experimentally realizable using superconducting transmon qubits with tunable couplings. We also propose a PST assisted quantum computing model where we show the computational advantage of using PST against the conventional resource expensive quantum swap gates. In addition, we present the numerical study of signed graphs under Corona product of graphs and show few examples where PST is established, in contrast to pre-existing results in the literature for disproof of PST under Corona product. We also report an error in pre-existing research for qudit state transfer over Bosonic Hamiltonian where unitarity is violated.
01
Jul
2020
A three-wave mixing kinetic inductance traveling-wave amplifier with near-quantum-limited noise performance
We present a theoretical model and experimental characterization of a microwave kinetic inductance traveling-wave amplifier (KIT), whose noise performance, measured by a shot noise
thermometer, approaches the quantum limit. Biased with a dc current, the KIT operates in a three-wave mixing fashion, thereby reducing by several orders of magnitude the power of the microwave pump tone compared to conventional four-wave mixing KIT devices. It is built in an artificial transmission line intrinsically matched to 50 Ohms, whose dispersion allows for a controlled amplification bandwidth. We experimentally measure 17.6+1.1−1.4 dB of gain across a 2 GHz bandwidth, with an input 1 dB compression power of -63 dBm within that bandwidth, in qualitative agreement with theory. Using the KIT as the first amplifier in an amplification chain, we measure a system-added noise of 0.61±0.08 K between 3.5 and 5.5 GHz, about one eighth the noise obtained when using only a representative classical amplifier. The KIT contribution to this added noise is estimated to be 0.2±0.1 K, consistent with the quantum limit on amplifier added noise. This device is therefore suitable to read large arrays of microwave kinetic inductance detectors or thousands of superconducting qubits.
Photon-Dressed Bloch-Siegert Shift in an Ultrastrongly Coupled Circuit Quantum Electrodynamical System
A cavity quantum electrodynamical (QED) system beyond the strong-coupling regime is expected to exhibit intriguing quantum phenomena. Here we report a direct measurement of the photon-dressed
qubit transition frequencies up to four photons by harnessing the same type of state transitions in an ultrastrongly coupled circuit-QED system realized by inductively coupling a superconducting flux qubit to a coplanar-waveguide resonator. This demonstrates a convincing observation of the photon-dressed Bloch-Siegert shift in the ultrastrongly coupled quantum system. Moreover, our results show that the photon-dressed Bloch-Siegert shift becomes more pronounced as the photon number increases, which is a characteristic of the quantum Rabi model.
30
Jun
2020
Highly coherent superconducting qubits from a subtractive junction fabrication process
Josephson tunnel junctions are the centerpiece of almost any superconducting electronic circuit, including qubits. Typically, the junctions for qubits are fabricated using shadow evaporation
techniques to reduce dielectric loss contributions from the superconducting film interfaces. In recent years, however, sub-micron scale overlap junctions have started to attract attention. Compared to shadow mask techniques, neither an angle dependent deposition nor free-standing bridges or overlaps are needed, which are significant limitations for wafer-scale processing. This comes at the cost of breaking the vacuum during fabrication, but simplifies integration in multi-layered circuits, implementation of vastly different junction sizes, and enables fabrication on a larger scale in an industrially-standardized process. In this work, we demonstrate the feasibility of a subtractive process for fabrication of overlap junctions. We evaluate the coherence properties of the junctions by employing them in superconducting transmon qubits. In time domain experiments, we find that both, the qubit life- and coherence time of our best device, are on average greater than 20 μs. Finally, we discuss potential improvements to our technique. This work paves the way towards a more standardized process flow with advanced materials and growth processes, and constitutes an important step for large scale fabrication of superconducting quantum circuits.
Effects of an environment on the ground state of circuit QED systems in the deep-strong coupling regime
We investigate theoretically how the ground state of a qubit-resonator system in the deep-strong coupling (DSC) regime is affected by the coupling to an environment. We employ a superposition
of coherent states displaced in the qubit-state-dependent directions as a variational ansatz for the ground state of the qubit-resonator-environment system. We show that the reduced density matrix of the qubit-resonator system strongly depends on types of the resonator-waveguide and resonator-qubit coupling, i.e., capacitive or inductive, because of the broken rotational symmetry of the eigenstates of the DSC system in the resonator phase space. When the resonator couples to the qubit and the environment in different ways (for instance, one is inductive and the other is capacitive), the system is almost unaffected by the resonator-waveguide coupling. In contrast, when the types of two couplings are the same (for instance, both are inductive), by increasing the resonator-waveguide coupling strength, the average number of virtual photons increases and the quantum superposition realized in the qubit-resonator entangled ground state is partially degraded. Since the superposition becomes more fragile when the qubit-resonator coupling strength gets large, there exists an optimal strength of the qubit-resonator coupling to maximize the nonclassicality of the qubit-resonator system.
29
Jun
2020
Improved Quantum State Tomography for Superconducting Quantum Computing Systems
Quantum device characterization via state tomography plays an important role in both validating quantum hardware and processing quantum information, unfortunately with the exponential
number of the measurements. As one of the main stream quantum platforms, superconducting quantum computing (SQC) system at least requires 3n measurement settings consisted of single-qubit readout operators in reconstructing a n-qubit state. In this work, I add the 2-qubit evolutions as the readout operators, and propose an optimal tomographic scheme with the cost-reduced measurements using the integer programming. In detail, I present the minimum number of required measurements to fully reconstruct a state for the Nearest-Neighbor, 2-Dimensional, and All-to-All connectivities on SQC qubits. It is shown that this method can reduce the number of measurements by over 60% compared with the previous state tomography on SQC systems. It is expected that the experimentalist from SQC field can directly utilize the ready-made results for reconstructing quantum states involved in their research. Besides, this method can be applied to reduce the complexity of traditional state tomography in some quantum platforms including but not limited to SQC systems.
23
Jun
2020
Topological photon pairs in a superconducting quantum metamaterial
Recent discoveries in topological physics hold a promise for disorder-robust quantum systems and technologies. Topological states provide the crucial ingredient of such systems featuring
increased robustness to disorder and imperfections. Here, we use an array of superconducting qubits to engineer a one-dimensional topologically nontrivial quantum metamaterial. By performing microwave spectroscopy of the fabricated array, we experimentally observe the spectrum of elementary excitations. We find not only the single-photon topological states but also the bands of exotic bound photon pairs arising due to the inherent anharmonicity of qubits. Furthermore, we detect the signatures of the two-photon bound edge-localized state which hints towards interaction-induced localization in our system. Our work demonstrates an experimental implementation of the topological model with attractive photon-photon interaction in a quantum metamaterial.