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
20
Sep
2021
Energetics of a Single Qubit Gate
Qubits are physical, a quantum gate thus not only acts on the information carried by the qubit but also on its energy. What is then the corresponding flow of energy between the qubit
and the controller that implements the gate? Here we exploit a superconducting platform to answer this question in the case of a quantum gate realized by a resonant drive field. During the gate, the superconducting qubit becomes entangled with the microwave drive pulse so that there is a quantum superposition between energy flows. We measure the energy change in the drive field conditioned on the outcome of a projective qubit measurement. We demonstrate that the drive’s energy change associated with the measurement backaction can exceed by far the energy that can be extracted by the qubit. This can be understood by considering the qubit as a weak measurement apparatus of the driving field.
16
Sep
2021
The scattering coefficients of superconducting microwave resonators: II. System-bath approach
We describe a unified quantum approach for analyzing the scattering coefficients of superconducting microwave resonators with a variety of geometries. We also generalize the method
to a chain of resonators in either hanger- or necklace-type, and reveal interesting transport properties similar to a photonic crystal. It is shown that both the quantum and classical analyses provide consistent results, and they together form a solid basis for analyzing the decoherence effect in a general microwave resonator. These results pave the way for designing and applying superconducting microwave resonators in complex circuits, and should stimulate the interest of distinguishing different decoherence mechanisms of a resonator mode beyond free energy relaxation.
The scattering coefficients of superconducting microwave resonators: I. Transfer-matrix approach
We describe a unified classical approach for analyzing the scattering coefficients of superconducting microwave resonators with a variety of geometries. To fill the gap between experiment
and theory, we also consider the influences of small circuit asymmetry and the finite length of the feedlines, and describe a procedure to correct them in typical measurement results. We show that, similar to the transmission coefficient of a hanger-type resonator, the reflection coefficient of a necklace- or bridge-type resonator does also contain a reference point which can be used to characterize the electrical properties of a microwave resonator in a single measurement. Our results provide a comprehensive understanding of superconducting microwave resonators from the design concepts to the characterization details.
14
Sep
2021
A CMOS compatible platform for high impedance superconducting quantum circuits
Aluminium based platforms have allowed to reach major milestones for superconducting quantum circuits. For the next generation of devices, materials that are able to maintain low microwave
losses while providing new functionalities, such as large kinetic inductance or compatibility with CMOS platform are sought for. Here we report on a combined direct current (DC) and microwave investigation of titanium nitride lms of dierent thicknesses grown using CMOS compatible methods. For microwave resonators made of TiN lm of thickness ∼3 nm, we measured large kinetic inductance LK ∼ 240 pH/sq, high mode impedance of ∼ 4.2 kΩ while maintaining microwave quality factor ∼ 10^5 in the single photon limit. We present an in-depth study of the microwave loss mechanisms in these devices that indicates the importance of quasiparticles and provide insights for further improvement.
A modular quantum computer based on a quantum state router
In this work, we present the design of a superconducting, microwave quantum state router which can realize all-to-all couplings among four quantum modules. Each module consists of a
single transmon, readout mode, and communication mode coupled to the router. The router design centers on a parametrically driven, Josephson-junction based three-wave mixing element which generates photon exchange among the modules‘ communication modes. We first demonstrate SWAP operations among the four communication modes, with an average full-SWAP time of 760 ns and average inter-module gate fidelity of 0.97, limited by our modes‘ coherences. We also demonstrate photon transfer and pairwise entanglement between the modules‘ qubits, and parallel operation of simultaneous SWAP gates across the router. These results can readily be extended to faster and higher fidelity router operations, as well as scaled to support larger networks of quantum modules.
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.