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
10
Jun
2021
Coherent control of a symmetry-engineered multi-qubit dark state in waveguide quantum electrodynamics
Quantum information is typically encoded in the state of a qubit that is decoupled from the environment. In contrast, waveguide quantum electrodynamics studies qubits coupled to a mode
continuum, exposing them to a loss channel and causing quantum information to be lost before coherent operations can be performed. Here we restore coherence by realizing a dark state that exploits symmetry properties and interactions between four qubits. Dark states decouple from the waveguide and are thus a valuable resource for quantum information but also come with a challenge: they cannot be controlled by the waveguide drive. We overcome this problem by designing a drive that utilizes the symmetry properties of the collective state manifold allowing us to selectively drive both bright and dark states. The decay time of the dark state exceeds that of the waveguide-limited single qubit by more than two orders of magnitude. Spectroscopy on the second excitation manifold provides further insight into the level structure of the hybridized system. Our experiment paves the way for implementations of quantum many-body physics in waveguides and the realization of quantum information protocols using decoherence-free subspaces.
Geometric superinductance qubits: Controlling phase delocalization across a single Josephson junction
There are two elementary superconducting qubit types that derive directly from the quantum harmonic oscillator. In one the inductor is replaced by a nonlinear Josephson junction to
realize the widely used charge qubits with a compact phase variable and a discrete charge wavefunction. In the other the junction is added in parallel, which gives rise to an extended phase variable, continuous wavefunctions and a rich energy level structure due to the loop topology. While the corresponding rf-SQUID Hamiltonian was introduced as a quadratic, quasi-1D potential approximation to describe the fluxonium qubit implemented with long Josephson junction arrays, in this work we implement it directly using a linear superinductor formed by a single uninterrupted aluminum wire. We present a large variety of qubits all stemming from the same circuit but with drastically different characteristic energy scales. This includes flux and fluxonium qubits but also the recently introduced quasi-charge qubit with strongly enhanced zero point phase fluctuations and a heavily suppressed flux dispersion. The use of a geometric inductor results in high precision of the inductive and capacitive energy as guaranteed by top-down lithography – a key ingredient for intrinsically protected superconducting qubits. The geometric fluxonium also exhibits a large magnetic dipole, which renders it an interesting new candidate for quantum sensing applications.
Material matters in superconducting qubits
The progress witnessed within the field of quantum computing has been enabled by the identification and understanding of interactions between the state of the quantum bit (qubit) and
the materials within its environment. Beginning with an introduction of the parameters used to differentiate various quantum computing approaches, we discuss the evolution of the key components that comprise superconducting qubits, where the methods of fabrication can play as important a role as the composition in dictating the overall performance. We describe several mechanisms that are responsible for the relaxation or decoherence of superconducting qubits and the corresponding methods that can be utilized to characterize their influence. In particular, the effects of dielectric loss and its manifestation through the interaction with two-level systems (TLS) are discussed. We elaborate on the methods that are employed to quantify dielectric loss through the modeling of energy flowing through the surrounding dielectric materials, which can include contributions due to both intrinsic TLS and extrinsic aspects, such as those generated by processing. The resulting analyses provide insight into identifying the relative participation of specific sections of qubit designs and refinements in construction that can mitigate their impact on qubit quality factors. Additional prominent mechanisms that can lead to energy relaxation within qubits are presented along with experimental techniques which assess their importance. We close by highlighting areas of future research that should be addressed to help facilitating the successful scaling of superconducting quantum computing.
09
Jun
2021
CircuitQ: An open-source toolbox for superconducting circuits
We introduce CircuitQ, an open-source toolbox for the analysis of superconducting circuits implemented in Python. It features the automated construction of a symbolic Hamiltonian of
the input circuit, as well as a dynamic numerical representation of this Hamiltonian with a variable basis choice. Additional features include the estimation of the T1 lifetimes of the circuit states under various noise mechanisms. We review previously established circuit quantization methods and formulate them in a way that facilitates the software implementation. The toolbox is then showcased by applying it to practically relevant qubit circuits and comparing it to specialized circuit solvers. Our circuit quantization is both applicable to circuit inputs from a large design space and the software is open-sourced. We thereby add an important toolbox for the design of new quantum circuits for quantum information processing applications.
Intrinsic mechanisms for drive-dependent Purcell decay in superconducting quantum circuits
We develop a new approach to understanding intrinsic mechanisms that cause the T1-decay rate of a multi-level superconducting qubit to depend on the photonic population of a coupled,
detuned cavity. Our method yields simple analytic expressions for both the coherently driven or thermally excited cases which are in good agreement with full master equation numerics, and also facilitates direct physical intuition. It also predicts several new phenomena. In particular, we find that in a wide range of settings, the cavity-qubit detuning controls whether a non-zero photonic population increases or decreases qubit Purcell decay. Our method combines insights from a Keldysh treatment of the system, and Lindblad perturbation theory.
08
Jun
2021
Theoretical study of reflection spectroscopy for superconducting quantum parametrons
Superconducting parametrons in the single-photon Kerr regime, also called KPOs, have been attracting increasing attention in terms of their applications to quantum annealing and universal
quantum computation. It is of practical importance to obtain information of superconducting parametrons operating under an oscillating pump field. Spectroscopy can provide information of a superconducting parametron under examination, such as energy level structure and occupation of energy levels, and also useful information for calibration of the pump field. We theoretically study the reflection spectroscopy of superconducting parametrons, and develop a method to obtain the reflection coefficient. We present formulae of the reflection coefficient, the nominal external and the internal decay rates, and examine the obtained spectra.
07
Jun
2021
Realization of a Universal Quantum Gate Set for Itinerant Microwave Photons
Deterministic photon-photon gates enable the controlled generation of entanglement between mobile carriers of quantum information. Such gates have thus far been exclusively realized
in the optical domain and by relying on post-selection. Here, we present a non-post-selected, deterministic, photon-photon gate in the microwave frequency range realized using superconducting circuits. We emit photonic qubits from a source chip and route those qubits to a gate chip with which we realize a universal gate set by combining controlled absorption and re-emission with single-qubit gates and qubit-photon controlled-phase gates. We measure quantum process fidelities of 75% for single- and of 57% for two-qubit gates, limited mainly by radiation loss and decoherence. This universal gate set has a wide range of potential applications in superconducting quantum networks.
Realization of Super-Robust Geometric Control in a Superconducting Circuit
Geometric phases accompanying adiabatic quantum evolutions can be used to construct robust quantum control for quantum information processing due to their noise-resilient feature. A
significant development along this line is to construct geometric gates using nonadiabatic quantum evolutions to reduce errors due to decoherence. However, it has been shown that nonadiabatic geometric gates are not necessarily more robust than dynamical ones, in contrast to an intuitive expectation. Here we experimentally investigate this issue for the case of nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation~(NHQC) and show that conventional NHQC schemes cannot guarantee the expected robustness due to a cross coupling to the states outside the computational space. We implement a new set of constraints for gate construction in order to suppress such cross coupling to achieve an enhanced robustness. Using a superconducting quantum circuit, we demonstrate high-fidelity holonomic gates whose infidelity against quasi-static transverse errors can be suppressed up to the fourth order, instead of the second order in conventional NHQC and dynamical gates. In addition, we explicitly measure the accumulated dynamical phase due to the above mentioned cross coupling and verify that it is indeed much reduced in our NHQC scheme. We further demonstrate a protocol for constructing two-qubit NHQC gates also with an enhanced robustness.
05
Jun
2021
Magnetic-free traveling-wave nonreciprocal superconducting microwave components
We propose a design to realize integrated broadband nonreciprocal microwave isolators and circulators using superconducting circuit elements without any magnetic materials. To obtain
a broadband response, we develop a waveguide-based design by temporal modulations. The corresponding compact traveling-wave structure is implemented with integrated superconducting composite right-/left-handed transmission lines. The calculations show that the bandwidth of 580 MHz can be realized over a nonreciprocal isolation of 20 dB in reflections. Such on-chip isolators and circulators are useful for cryogenic integrated microwave connections and measurements, such as protecting qubits from the amplified reflected signal in multiplexed readout.
03
Jun
2021
Quasiparticle tunneling and 1/f charge noise in ultrastrongly coupled superconducting qubit and resonator
We report an experimentally observed anomalous doubly split spectrum and its split-width fluctuation in an ultrastrongly coupled superconducting qubit and resonator. From an analysis
of Rabimodel and circuit model Hamiltonians, we found that the doubly split spectrum and split-width fluctuation are caused by discrete charge hops due to quasiparticle tunnelings and a continuous background charge fluctuation in islands of a flux qubit. During 70 hours in the spectrum measurement, split width fluctuates but the middle frequency of the split is constant. This result indicates that quasiparticles in our device seem mainly tunnel one particular junction. The background offsetcharge obtained from split width has the 1/f noise characteristic.