Protecting quantum entanglement from qubit errors and leakage via repetitive parity measurements

  1. C. C. Bultink,
  2. T. E. O'Brien,
  3. R. Vollmer,
  4. N. Muthusubramanian,
  5. M. W. Beekman,
  6. M. A. Rol,
  7. X. Fu,
  8. B. Tarasinski,
  9. V. Ostroukh,
  10. B. Varbanov,
  11. A. Bruno,
  12. and L. DiCarlo
Protecting quantum information from errors is essential for large-scale quantum computation. Quantum error correction (QEC) encodes information in entangled states of many qubits, and
performs parity measurements to identify errors without destroying the encoded information. However, traditional QEC cannot handle leakage from the qubit computational space. Leakage affects leading experimental platforms, based on trapped ions and superconducting circuits, which use effective qubits within many-level physical systems. We investigate how two-transmon entangled states evolve under repeated parity measurements, and demonstrate the use of hidden Markov models to detect leakage using only the record of parity measurement outcomes required for QEC. We show the stabilization of Bell states over up to 26 parity measurements by mitigating leakage using postselection, and correcting qubit errors using Pauli-frame transformations. Our leakage identification method is computationally efficient and thus compatible with real-time leakage tracking and correction in larger quantum processors.

General method for extracting the quantum efficiency of dispersive qubit readout in circuit QED

  1. C. C. Bultink,
  2. B. Tarasinski,
  3. N. Haandbaek,
  4. S. Poletto,
  5. N. Haider,
  6. D. J. Michalak,
  7. A. Bruno,
  8. and L. DiCarlo
We present and demonstrate a general 3-step method for extracting the quantum efficiency of dispersive qubit readout in circuit QED. We use active depletion of post-measurement photons
and optimal integration weight functions on two quadratures to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio of non-steady-state homodyne measurement. We derive analytically and demonstrate experimentally that the method robustly extracts the quantum efficiency for arbitrary readout conditions in the linear regime. We use the proven method to optimally bias a Josephon traveling-wave parametric amplifier and to quantify the different noise contributions in the readout amplification chain.