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
14
Sep
2021
Generation of photonic tensor network states with Circuit QED
We propose a circuit QED platform and protocol to deterministically generate microwave photonic tensor network states. We first show that using a microwave cavity as ancilla and a transmon
qubit as emitter is a favorable platform to produce photonic matrix-product states. The ancilla cavity combines a large controllable Hilbert space with a long coherence time, which we predict translates into a high number of entangled photons and states with a high bond dimension. Going beyond this paradigm, we then consider a natural generalization of this platform, in which several cavity–qubit pairs are coupled to form a chain. The photonic states thus produced feature a two-dimensional entanglement structure and are readily interpreted as radial plaquette projected entangled pair states, which include many paradigmatic states, such as the broad class of isometric tensor network states, graph states, string-net states.
13
Sep
2021
Realizing Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks on a Superconducting Quantum Processor to Recognize Quantum Phases
Quantum computing crucially relies on the ability to efficiently characterize the quantum states output by quantum hardware. Conventional methods which probe these states through direct
measurements and classically computed correlations become computationally expensive when increasing the system size. Quantum neural networks tailored to recognize specific features of quantum states by combining unitary operations, measurements and feedforward promise to require fewer measurements and to tolerate errors. Here, we realize a quantum convolutional neural network (QCNN) on a 7-qubit superconducting quantum processor to identify symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases of a spin model characterized by a non-zero string order parameter. We benchmark the performance of the QCNN based on approximate ground states of a family of cluster-Ising Hamiltonians which we prepare using a hardware-efficient, low-depth state preparation circuit. We find that, despite being composed of finite-fidelity gates itself, the QCNN recognizes the topological phase with higher fidelity than direct measurements of the string order parameter for the prepared states.
Realization of high-fidelity CZ gates in extensible superconducting qubits design with a tunable coupler
High-fidelity two-qubits gates are essential for the realization of large-scale quantum computation and simulation. Tunable coupler design is used to reduce the problem of parasitic
coupling and frequency crowding in many-qubit systems and thus thought to be advantageous. Here we design a extensible 5-qubit system in which center transmon qubit can couple to every four near-neighbor qubit via a capacitive tunable coupler and experimentally demonstrate high-fidelity controlled-phase (CZ) gate by manipulating center qubit and one near-neighbor qubit. Speckle purity benchmarking (SPB) and cross entrophy benchmarking (XEB) are used to assess the purity fidelity and the fidelity of the CZ gate. The average purity fidelity of the CZ gate is 99.69±0.04\% and the average fidelity of the CZ gate is 99.65±0.04\% which means the control error is about 0.04\%. Our work will help resovle many chanllenges in the implementation of large scale quantum systems.
12
Sep
2021
Observation of a symmetry-protected topological time crystal with superconducting qubits
We report the observation of a symmetry-protected topological time crystal, which is implemented with an array of programmable superconducting qubits. Unlike the time crystals reported
in previous experiments, where spontaneous breaking of the discrete time translational symmetry occurs for local observables throughout the whole system, the topological time crystal observed in our experiment breaks the time translational symmetry only at the boundaries and has trivial dynamics in the bulk. More concretely, we observe robust long-lived temporal correlations and sub-harmonic temporal response for the edge spins up to 40 driving cycles. We demonstrate that the sub-harmonic response is independent of whether the initial states are random product states or symmetry-protected topological states, and experimentally map out the phase boundary between the time crystalline and thermal phases. Our work paves the way to exploring peculiar non-equilibrium phases of matter emerged from the interplay between topology and localization as well as periodic driving, with current noisy intermediate-scale quantum processors.
09
Sep
2021
Chiral Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics
Cavity quantum electrodynamics, which explores the granularity of light by coupling a resonator to a nonlinear emitter, has played a foundational role in the development of modern quantum
information science and technology. In parallel, the field of condensed matter physics has been revolutionized by the discovery of underlying topological robustness in the face of disorder, often arising from the breaking of time-reversal symmetry, as in the case of the quantum Hall effect. In this work, we explore for the first time cavity quantum electrodynamics of a transmon qubit in the topological vacuum of a Harper-Hofstadter topological lattice. To achieve this, we assemble a square lattice of niobium superconducting resonators and break time-reversal symmetry by introducing ferrimagnets before coupling the system to a single transmon qubit. We spectroscopically resolve the individual bulk and edge modes of this lattice, detect vacuum-stimulated Rabi oscillations between the excited transmon and each mode, and thereby measure the synthetic-vacuum-induced Lamb shift of the transmon. Finally, we demonstrate the ability to employ the transmon to count individual photons within each mode of the topological band structure. This work opens the field of chiral quantum optics experiment, suggesting new routes to topological many-body physics and offering unique approaches to backscatter-resilient quantum communication.
08
Sep
2021
Quantum Circuit Engineering for Correcting Coherent Noise
Crosstalk and several sources of operational interference are invisible when qubit or a gate is calibrated or benchmarked in isolation. These are unlocked during the execution of full
quantum circuit applying entangling gates to several qubits simultaneously. Unwanted Z-Z coupling on superconducting cross-resonance CNOT gates, is a commonly occurring unitary crosstalk noise that severely limits the state fidelity. This work presents (1) method of tracing unitary errors, which exploits their sensitivity to the arrangement of CNOT gates in the circuit and (2) correction scheme that modifies original circuit by inserting carefully chosen compensating gates (single- or two-qubit) to possibly undo unitary errors. On two vastly different types of IBMQ processors offering quantum volume 8 and 32, our experimental results show up to 25% reduction in the infidelity of [[7, 1, 3]] code |+> state. Our experiments aggressively deploy forced commutation of CNOT gates to obtain low noise state-preparation circuits. Encoded state initialized with fewer unitary errors marks an important step towards successful demonstration of fault-tolerant quantum computers.
07
Sep
2021
Miniaturizing transmon qubits using van der Waals materials
Quantum computers can potentially achieve an exponential speedup versus classical computers on certain computational tasks, as was recently demonstrated in systems of superconductingqubits. However, these qubits have large footprints due to the need of ultra low-loss capacitors. The large electric field volume of \textit{quantum compatible} capacitors stems from their distributed nature. This hinders scaling by increasing parasitic coupling in circuit designs, degrading individual qubit addressability, and limiting the minimum achievable circuit area. Here, we report the use of van der Waals (vdW) materials to reduce the qubit area by a factor of >1000. These qubit structures combine parallel-plate capacitors comprising crystalline layers of superconducting niobium diselenide (NbSe2) and insulating hexagonal-boron nitride (hBN) with conventional aluminum-based Josephson junctions. We measure a vdW transmon T1 relaxation time of 1.06 μs, demonstrating that a highly-compact capacitor can reach a loss-tangent of <2.83×10−5. Our results demonstrate a promising path towards breaking the paradigm of requiring large geometric capacitors for long quantum coherence in superconducting qubits, and illustrate the broad utility of layered heterostructures in low-loss, high-coherence quantum devices.[/expand]
A Cooper-Pair Box Architecture for Cyclic Quantum Heat Engines
Here we present an architecture for the implementation of cyclic quantum thermal engines using a superconducting circuit. The quantum engine consists of a gated Cooper-pair box, capacitively
coupled to two superconducting coplanar waveguide resonators with different frequencies, acting as thermal baths. We experimentally demonstrate the strong coupling of a charge qubit to two superconducting resonators, with the ability to perform voltage driving of the qubit at GHz frequencies. By terminating the resonators of the measured structure with normal-metal resistors whose temperature can be controlled and monitored, a quantum heat engine or refrigerator could be realized. Furthermore, we numerically evaluate the performance of our setup acting as a quantum Otto-refrigerator in the presence of realistic environmental decoherence.
03
Sep
2021
Speed limits for quantum gates with weakly anharmonic qubits
We consider the implementation of two-qubit gates when the physical systems used to realize the qubits are weakly anharmonic and therefore possess additional quantum states in the accessible
energy range. We analyze the effect of the additional quantum states on the maximum achievable speed for quantum gates in the qubit state space. By calculating the minimum gate time using optimal control theory, we find that higher energy levels can help make two-qubit gates significantly faster than the reference value based on simple qubits. This speedup is a result of the higher coupling strength between higher energy levels. We then analyze the situation where the pulse optimization algorithm avoids pulses that excite the higher levels. We find that in this case the presence of the additional states can lead to a significant reduction in the maximum achievable gate speed. We also compare the optimal control gate times with those obtained using the cross-resonance/selective-darkening gate protocol. We find that the latter, with some parameter optimization, can be used to achieve a relatively fast implementation of the CNOT gate. These results can help the search for optimized gate implementations in realistic quantum computing architectures, such as those based on superconducting qubits. They also provide guidelines for desirable conditions on anharmonicity that would allow optimal utilization of the higher levels to achieve fast quantum gates.
Level attraction and idler resonance in a strongly driven Josephson cavity
Nonlinear Josephson circuits play a crucial role in the growing landscape of quantum information and technologies. The typical circuits studied in this field consist of qubits, whose
anharmonicity is much larger than their linewidth, and also of parametric amplifiers, which are engineered with linewidths of tens of MHz or more. The regime of small anharmonicity but also narrow linewidth, corresponding to the dynamics of a high-Q Duffing oscillator, has not been extensively explored using Josephson cavities. Here, we use two-tone spectroscopy to study the susceptibility of a strongly driven high-Q Josephson microwave cavity. Under blue-detuned driving, we observe a shift of the cavity susceptibility, analogous to the AC Stark effect in atomic physics. When applying a strong red-detuned drive, we observe the appearance of an additional idler mode above the bifurcation threshold with net external gain. Strong driving of the circuit leads to the appearance of two exceptional points and a level attraction between the quasi-modes of the driven cavity. Our results provide insights on the physics of driven nonlinear Josephson resonators and form a starting point for exploring topological physics in strongly-driven Kerr oscillators.