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
13
Nov
2020
Quantum simulations of light-matter interactions in arbitrary coupling regimes
Light-matter interactions are an established field that is experiencing a renaissance in recent years due to the introduction of exotic coupling regimes. These include the ultrastrong
and deep strong coupling regimes, where the coupling constant is smaller and of the order of the frequency of the light mode, or larger than this frequency, respectively. In the past few years, quantum simulations of light-matter interactions in all possible coupling regimes have been proposed and experimentally realized, in quantum platforms such as trapped ions, superconducting circuits, cold atoms, and quantum photonics. We review this fledgling field, illustrating the benefits and challenges of the quantum simulations of light-matter interactions with quantum technologies.
An engineer’s brief introduction to microwave quantum optics and a single-port state-space representation
Classical microwave circuit theory is incapable of representing some phenomena at the quantum level. To include quantum statistical effects when treating microwave networks, various
theoretical treatments can be employed such as quantum input-output network (QION) theory and SLH theory. However, these require a reformulation of classical microwave theory. To make these topics comprehensible to an electrical engineer, we demonstrate some underpinnings of microwave quantum optics in terms of microwave engineering. For instance, we equate traveling-wave phasors in a transmission line (V+0) directly to bosonic field operators. Furthermore, we extend QION to include a state-space representation and a transfer function for a single port quantum network. This serves as a case study to highlight how microwave methodologies can be applied in open quantum systems. Although the same conclusion could be found from a full SLH theory treatment, our method was derived directly from first principles of QION.
Demonstration of a High-Fidelity CNOT for Fixed-Frequency Transmons with Engineered ZZ Suppression
Improving two-qubit gate performance and suppressing crosstalk are major, but often competing, challenges to achieving scalable quantum computation. In particular, increasing the coupling
to realize faster gates has been intrinsically linked to enhanced crosstalk due to unwanted two-qubit terms in the Hamiltonian. Here, we demonstrate a novel coupling architecture for transmon qubits that circumvents the standard relationship between desired and undesired interaction rates. Using two fixed frequency coupling elements to tune the dressed level spacings, we demonstrate an intrinsic suppression of the static ZZ, while maintaining large effective coupling rates. Our architecture reveals no observable degradation of qubit coherence (T1,T2>100 μs) and, over a factor of 6 improvement in the ratio of desired to undesired coupling. Using the cross-resonance interaction we demonstrate a 180~ns single-pulse CNOT gate, and measure a CNOT fidelity of 99.77(2)% from interleaved randomized benchmarking.
12
Nov
2020
A Nonlinear Charge and Flux Tunable Cavity Derived from an Embedded Cooper Pair Transistor
We introduce the cavity-embedded Cooper pair transistor (cCPT), a device which behaves as a highly nonlinear microwave cavity whose resonant frequency can be tuned both by charging
a gate capacitor and by threading flux through a SQUID loop. We characterize this device and find excellent agreement between theory and experiment. A key difficulty in this characterization is the presence of frequency fluctuations comparable in scale to the cavity linewidth, which deform our measured resonance circles in accordance with recent theoretical predictions [B. L. Brock et al., Phys. Rev. Applied (to be published), arXiv:1906.11989]. By measuring the power spectral density of these frequency fluctuations at carefully chosen points in parameter space, we find that they are primarily a result of the 1/f charge and flux noise common in solid state devices. Notably, we also observe key signatures of frequency fluctuations induced by quantum fluctuations in the cavity field via the Kerr nonlinearity.
10
Nov
2020
Simplified Josephson-junction fabrication process for reproducibly high-performance superconducting qubits
We introduce a simplified fabrication technique for Josephson junctions and demonstrate superconducting Xmon qubits with T1 relaxation times averaging above 50 μs (Q>1.5× 106). Current
shadow-evaporation techniques for aluminum-based Josephson junctions require a separate lithography step to deposit a patch that makes a galvanic, superconducting connection between the junction electrodes and the circuit wiring layer. The patch connection eliminates parasitic junctions, which otherwise contribute significantly to dielectric loss. In our patch-integrated cross-type (PICT) junction technique, we use one lithography step and one vacuum cycle to evaporate both the junction electrodes and the patch. In a study of more than 3600 junctions, we show an average resistance variation of 3.7% on a wafer that contains forty 0.5×0.5-cm2 chips, with junction areas ranging between 0.01 and 0.16 μm2. The average on-chip spread in resistance is 2.7%, with 20 chips varying between 1.4 and 2%. For the junction sizes used for transmon qubits, we deduce a wafer-level transition-frequency variation of 1.7-2.5%. We show that 60-70% of this variation is attributed to junction-area fluctuations, while the rest is caused by tunnel-junction inhomogeneity. Such high frequency predictability is a requirement for scaling-up the number of qubits in a quantum computer.
Quantum versus Classical Regime in Circuit Quantum Acoustodynamics
We experimentally study a circuit quantum acoustodynamics system, which consists of a superconducting artificial atom, coupled to both a two-dimensional surface acoustic wave resonator
and a one-dimensional microwave transmission line. The strong coupling between the artificial atom and the acoustic wave resonator is confirmed by the observation of the vacuum Rabi splitting at the base temperature of dilution refrigerator. We show that the propagation of microwave photons in the microwave transmission line can be controlled by a few phonons in the acoustic wave resonator. Furthermore, we demonstrate the temperature effect on the measurements of the Rabi splitting and temperature induced transitions from high excited dressed states. We find that the spectrum structure of two-peak for the Rabi splitting becomes into those of several peaks, and gradually disappears with the increase of the environmental temperature T. The quantum-to-classical transition is observed around the crossover temperature Tc, which is determined via the thermal fluctuation energy kBT and the characteristic energy level spacing of the coupled system. Experimental results agree well with the theoretical simulations via the master equation of the coupled system at different effective temperatures.
08
Nov
2020
Suppression of static ZZ interaction in an all-transmon quantum processor
The superconducting transmon qubit is currently a leading qubit modality for quantum computing, but gate performance in quantum processor with transmons is often insufficient to support
running complex algorithms for practical applications. It is thus highly desirable to further improve gate performance. Due to the weak anharmonicity of transmon, a static ZZ interaction between coupled transmons commonly exists, undermining the gate performance, and in long term, it can become performance limiting. Here we theoretically explore a previously unexplored parameter region in an all-transmon system to address this issue. We show that an experimentally feasible parameter region, where the ZZ interaction is heavily suppressed while leaving XY interaction with an adequate strength to implement two-qubit gates, can be found in an all-transmon system. Thus, two-qubit gates, such as cross-resonance gate or iSWAP gate, can be realized without the detrimental effect from static ZZ interaction. To illustrate this, we show that an iSWAP gate with fast gate speed and dramatically lower conditional phase error can be achieved. Scaling up to large-scale transmon quantum processor, especially the cases with fixed coupling, addressing error, idling error, and crosstalk that arises from static ZZ interaction could also be heavily suppressed.
07
Nov
2020
Efficient simulation of so-called non-stoquastic superconducting flux circuits
There is a tremendous interest in fabricating superconducting flux circuits that are nonstoquastic—i.e., have positive off-diagonal matrix elements—in their qubit representation,
as these circuits are thought to be unsimulable by classical approaches and thus could play a key role in the demonstration of speedups in quantum annealing protocols. We show however that the efficient simulation of these systems is possible by the direct simulation of the flux circuits. Our approach not only obviates the reduction to a qubit representation but also produces results that are more in the spirit of the experimental setup. We discuss the implications of our work. Specifically we argue that our results cast doubt on the conception that superconducting flux circuits represent the correct avenue for universal adiabatic quantum computers.
Double Resonance Landau-Zener-Stückelburg-Majorana Interference in Circuit QED
We report on Floquet spectroscopy in a cavity-coupled double quantum dot system. By applying microwave induced consecutive passages, we observe Landau-Zener-Stückelberg-Majorana fringes
which are split by holes with the shape of crescents. We demonstrate that these crescents represent a universal feature that stems from a depletion of the predominantly occupied Floquet state at avoided crossings of the Floquet spectrum. The emergence of crescents can be controlled electrically via drive frequency and amplitude, which is perfectly consistent with the simulations based on our theoretical model. These results provide insight to the nonequilibrium population of Floquet states.
06
Nov
2020
Perfect state transfer on hypercubes and its implementation using superconducting qubits
We propose a protocol for perfect state transfer between any pair of vertices in a hypercube. Given a pair of distinct vertices in the hypercube we determine a sub-hypercube that contains
the pair of vertices as antipodal vertices. Then a switching process is introduced for determining the sub-hypercube of a memory enhanced hypercube that facilitates perfect state transfer between the desired pair of vertices. Furthermore, we propose a physical architecture for the pretty good state transfer implementation of our switching protocol with fidelity arbitrary close to unity, using superconducting transmon qubits with tunable couplings. The switching is realised by the control over the effective coupling between the qubits resulting from the effect of ancilla qubit couplers for the graph edges. We also report an error bound on the fidelity of state transfer due to faulty implementation of our protocol.