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
18
Feb
2021
Quantum control of bosonic modes with superconducting circuits
Bosonic modes have wide applications in various quantum technologies, such as optical photons for quantum communication, magnons in spin ensembles for quantum information storage and
mechanical modes for reversible microwave-to-optical quantum transduction. There is emerging interest in utilizing bosonic modes for quantum information processing, with circuit quantum electrodynamics (circuit QED) as one of the leading architectures. Quantum information can be encoded into subspaces of a bosonic superconducting cavity mode with long coherence time. However, standard Gaussian operations (e.g., beam splitting and two-mode squeezing) are insufficient for universal quantum computing. The major challenge is to introduce additional nonlinear control beyond Gaussian operations without adding significant bosonic loss or decoherence. Here we review recent advances in universal control of a single bosonic code with superconducting circuits, including unitary control, quantum feedback control, driven-dissipative control and holonomic dissipative control. Entangling different bosonic modes with various approaches is also discussed.
Simulating long-range hopping with periodically-driven superconducting qubits
Quantum computers are a leading platform for the simulation of many-body physics. This task has been recently facilitated by the possibility to program directly the time-dependent pulses
sent to the computer. Here, we use this feature to simulate quantum lattice models with long-range hopping. Our approach is based on an exact mapping between periodically driven quantum systems and one-dimensional lattices in the synthetic Floquet direction. By engineering a periodic drive with a power-law spectrum, we simulate a lattice with long-range hopping, whose decay exponent is freely tunable. We propose and realize experimentally two protocols to probe the long tails of the Floquet eigenfunctions and to identify a scaling transition between weak and strong long-range couplings. Our work offers a useful benchmark of pulse engineering and opens the route towards quantum simulations of rich nonequilibrium effects.
Non-linearity in the system of quasiparticles of a superconducting resonator
We observed a strong non-linearity in the system of quasiparticles of a superconducting aluminum resonator, due to the Cooper-pair breaking from the absorbed readout power. We observed
both negative and positive feedback effects, controlled by the detuning of the readout frequency, which are able to alter the relaxation time of quasiparticles by a factor greater than 10. We estimate that the (70+/-5) % of the total non-linearity of the device is due to quasiparticles.
16
Feb
2021
A hardware-efficient leakage-reduction scheme for quantum error correction with superconducting transmon qubits
Leakage outside of the qubit computational subspace poses a threatening challenge to quantum error correction (QEC). We propose a scheme using two leakage-reduction units (LRUs) that
mitigate these issues for a transmon-based surface code, without requiring an overhead in terms of hardware or QEC-cycle time as in previous proposals. For data qubits we consider a microwave drive to transfer leakage to the readout resonator, where it quickly decays, ensuring that this negligibly affects the coherence within the computational subspace for realistic system parameters. For ancilla qubits we apply a |1⟩↔|2⟩ π pulse conditioned on the measurement outcome. Using density-matrix simulations of the distance-3 surface code we show that the average leakage lifetime is reduced to almost 1 QEC cycle, even when the LRUs are implemented with limited fidelity. Furthermore, we show that this leads to a significant reduction of the logical error rate. This LRU scheme opens the prospect for near-term scalable QEC demonstrations.
11
Feb
2021
Removing leakage-induced correlated errors in superconducting quantum error correction
Quantum computing can become scalable through error correction, but logical error rates only decrease with system size when physical errors are sufficiently uncorrelated. During computation,
unused high energy levels of the qubits can become excited, creating leakage states that are long-lived and mobile. Particularly for superconducting transmon qubits, this leakage opens a path to errors that are correlated in space and time. Here, we report a reset protocol that returns a qubit to the ground state from all relevant higher level states. We test its performance with the bit-flip stabilizer code, a simplified version of the surface code for quantum error correction. We investigate the accumulation and dynamics of leakage during error correction. Using this protocol, we find lower rates of logical errors and an improved scaling and stability of error suppression with increasing qubit number. This demonstration provides a key step on the path towards scalable quantum computing.
10
Feb
2021
Observing a Topological Transition in Weak-Measurement-Induced Geometric Phases
Measurement plays a quintessential role in the control of quantum systems. Beyond initialization and readout which pertain to projective measurements, weak measurements in particular,
through their back-action on the system, may enable various levels of coherent control. The latter ranges from observing quantum trajectories to state dragging and steering. Furthermore, just like the adiabatic evolution of quantum states that is known to induce the Berry phase, sequential weak measurements may lead to path-dependent geometric phases. Here we measure the geometric phases induced by sequences of weak measurements and demonstrate a topological transition in the geometric phase controlled by measurement strength. This connection between weak measurement induced quantum dynamics and topological transitions reveals subtle topological features in measurement-based manipulation of quantum systems. Our protocol could be implemented for classes of operations (e.g. braiding) which are topological in nature. Furthermore, our results open new horizons for measurement-enabled quantum control of many-body topological states.
Error mitigation via stabilizer measurement emulation
Dynamical decoupling (DD) is a widely-used quantum control technique that takes advantage of temporal symmetries in order to partially suppress quantum errors without the need resource-intensive
error detection and correction protocols. This and other open-loop error mitigation techniques are critical for quantum information processing in the era of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum technology. However, despite its utility, dynamical decoupling does not address errors which occur at unstructured times during a circuit, including certain commonly-encountered noise mechanisms such as cross-talk and imperfectly calibrated control pulses. Here, we introduce and demonstrate an alternative technique – `quantum measurement emulation‘ (QME) – that effectively emulates the measurement of stabilizer operators via stochastic gate application, leading to a first-order insensitivity to coherent errors. The QME protocol enables error suppression based on the stabilizer code formalism without the need for costly measurements and feedback, and it is particularly well-suited to discrete coherent errors that are challenging for DD to address.
Large-scale GHZ states through topologically protected zero-energy mode in a superconducting qutrit-resonator chain
We propose a superconducting qutrit-resonator chain model, and analytically work out forms of its topological edge states. The existence of the zero-energy mode enables to generate
a state transfer between two ends of the chain, accompanied with state flips of all intermediate qutrits, based on which N-body Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states can be generated with great robustness against disorders of coupling strengths. Three schemes of generating large-scale GHZ states are designed, each of which possesses the robustness against loss of qutrits or of resonators, meeting a certain performance requirement of different experimental devices. With experimentally feasible qutrit-resonator coupling strengths and available coherence times of qutrits and resonators, it has a potential to generate large-scale GHZ states among dozens of qutrits with a high fidelity. Further, we show the experimental consideration of generating GHZ states based on the circuit QED system, and discuss the prospect of realizing fast GHZ states.
04
Feb
2021
Dissipative stabilization of squeezing beyond \SI{3}{dB} in a microwave mode
While a propagating state of light can be generated with arbitrary squeezing by pumping a parametric resonator, the intra-resonator state is limited to 3 dB of squeezing. Here, we implement
a reservoir engineering method to surpass this limit using superconducting circuits. Two-tone pumping of a three-wave-mixing element implements an effective coupling to a squeezed bath which stabilizes a squeezed state inside the resonator. Using an ancillary superconducting qubit as a probe allows us to perform a direct Wigner tomography of the intra-resonator state. The raw measurement provides a lower bound on the squeezing at about 6.7±0.2 dB below the zero-point level. Further, we show how to correct for resonator evolution during the Wigner tomography and obtain a squeezing as high as 8.2±0.8 dB. Moreover, this level of squeezing is achieved with a purity of −0.4±0.4 dB.
02
Feb
2021
Exploiting dynamic quantum circuits in a quantum algorithm with superconducting qubits
The execution of quantum circuits on real systems has largely been limited to those which are simply time-ordered sequences of unitary operations followed by a projective measurement.
As hardware platforms for quantum computing continue to mature in size and capability, it is imperative to enable quantum circuits beyond their conventional construction. Here we break into the realm of dynamic quantum circuits on a superconducting-based quantum system. Dynamic quantum circuits involve not only the evolution of the quantum state throughout the computation, but also periodic measurements of a subset of qubits mid-circuit and concurrent processing of the resulting classical information within timescales shorter than the execution times of the circuits. Using noisy quantum hardware, we explore one of the most fundamental quantum algorithms, quantum phase estimation, in its adaptive version, which exploits dynamic circuits, and compare the results to a non-adaptive implementation of the same algorithm. We demonstrate that the version of real-time quantum computing with dynamic circuits can offer a substantial and tangible advantage when noise and latency are sufficiently low in the system, opening the door to a new realm of available algorithms on real quantum systems.