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
28
Feb
2020
Effects of device geometry and material properties on dielectric losses in superconducting coplanar-waveguide resonators
Superconducting coplanar-waveguide (CPW) resonators are one of the key devices in circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED). Their performance can be limited by dielectric losses in the
substrate and in the material interfaces. Reliable modeling is required to aid in the design of low-loss CPW structures for cQED. We analyze the geometric dependence of the dielectric losses in CPW structures using finite-element modeling of the participation ratios of the lossy regions. In a practical scenario, uncertainties in the the dielectric constants and loss tangents of these regions introduce uncertainties in the theoretically predicted participation ratios. We present a method for combining loss simulations with measurements of two-level-system-limited quality factors and resonance frequencies of CPW resonators. Namely, we solve an inverse problem to find optimal model parameters producing the measured values. High quality factors are obtainable by properly designing the cross-sectional geometries of the CPW structures, but more accurate modeling and design methods for low-loss CPW resonators are called for major future improvements. Our nonlinear optimization methodology is a step in this direction.
27
Feb
2020
Emergent photon pair propagation in circuit QED with superconducting processors
We propose a method to achieve photon pair propagation in an array of three-level superconducting circuits. Assuming experimentally accessible three-level artificial atoms with strong
anharmonicity coupled via microwave transmission lines in both one and two dimensions we analyze the circuit Quantum Electrodynamics(QED) of the system. We explicitly show that for a suitable choice of the coupling ratio between different levels, the single photon propagation is suppressed and the propagation of photon pairs emerges. This propagation of photon pairs leads to the pair superfluid of polaritons associated to the system. We compute the complete phase diagram of the polariton quantum matter revealing the pair superfluid phase which is sandwiched between the vacuum and the Mott insulator state corresponding to the polariton density equal to two in the strong coupling regime.
26
Feb
2020
Electric field control of radiative heat transfer in a superconducting circuit
Heat is detrimental for the operation of quantum systems, yet it fundamentally behaves according to quantum mechanics, being phase coherent and universally quantum-limited regardless
of its carriers. Due to their robustness, superconducting circuits integrating dissipative elements are ideal candidates to emulate many-body phenomena in quantum heat transport, hitherto scarcely explored experimentally. However, their ability to tackle the underlying full physical richness is severely hindered by the exclusive use of a magnetic flux as a control parameter and requires complementary approaches. Here, we introduce a dual, magnetic field-free circuit where charge quantization in a superconducting island enables thorough electric field control. We thus tune the thermal conductance, close to its quantum limit, of a single photonic channel between two mesoscopic reservoirs. We observe heat flow oscillations originating from the competition between Cooper-pair tunnelling and Coulomb repulsion in the island, well captured by a simple model. Our results demonstrate that the duality between charge and flux extends to heat transport, with promising applications in thermal management of quantum devices.
25
Feb
2020
Universal fast flux control of a coherent, low-frequency qubit
The extit{heavy-fluxonium} circuit is a promising building block for superconducting quantum processors due to its long relaxation and dephasing time at the half-flux frustration
point. However, the suppressed charge matrix elements and low transition frequency have made it challenging to perform fast single-qubit gates using standard protocols. We report on new protocols for reset, fast coherent control, and readout, that allow high-quality operation of the qubit with a 14 MHz transition frequency, an order of magnitude lower in energy than the ambient thermal energy scale. We utilize higher levels of the fluxonium to initialize the qubit with 97\% fidelity, corresponding to cooling it to 190 μK. We realize high-fidelity control using a universal set of single-cycle flux gates, which are comprised of directly synthesizable fast pulses, while plasmon-assisted readout is used for measurements. On a qubit with T1,T2e∼~300~μs, we realize single-qubit gates in 20−60~ns with an average gate fidelity of 99.8% as characterized by randomized benchmarking.
Anneal-path correction in flux qubits
Quantum annealers require accurate control and optimized operation schemes to reduce noise levels, in order to eventually demonstrate a computational advantage over classical algorithms.
We study a high coherence four-junction capacitively shunted flux qubit (CSFQ), using dispersive measurements to extract system parameters and model the device. We confirm the multi-level structure of the circuit model of our CSFQ by annealing it through small spectral gaps and observing quantum signatures of energy level crossings. Josephson junction asymmetry inherent to the device causes a deleterious nonlinear cross-talk when annealing the qubit. We implement a nonlinear annealing path to correct the asymmetry in-situ, resulting in a 50% improvement in the qubit performance. Our results demonstrate a low-level quantum control scheme which enhances the success probability of a quantum annealer.
Landau-Zener-Stückelberg Interferometry in dissipative Circuit Quantum Electrodynamics
We study Landau-Zener-Stückelberg (LZS) interferometry in a cQED architecture under effects of dissipation. To be specific, we consider a superconducting qubit driven by a dc+ac signal
and coupled to a transmission line resonator, but our results are valid for general qubit-resonators devices. To take the environment into account, we assume that the resonator is coupled to an ohmic quantum bath. The Floquet-Born-Markov master equation is numerically solved to obtain the dynamics of the system for arbitrary amplitude of the drive and different time scales. We unveil important differences in the resonant patterns between the Strong Coupling and Ultra Strong Coupling regimes in the qubit-resonator interaction, which are mainly due to the magnitude of photonic gaps in the energy spectrum of the system. We identify in the LZS patterns the contribution of the qubit gap and the photonic gaps, showing that for large driving amplitudes the patterns present a weaving structure due to the combined intercrossing of the different gaps contributions.
21
Feb
2020
Characterizing and optimizing qubit coherence based on SQUID geometry
The dominant source of decoherence in contemporary frequency-tunable superconducting qubits is 1/f flux noise. To understand its origin and find ways to minimize its impact, we systematically
study flux noise amplitudes in more than 50 flux qubits with varied SQUID geometry parameters and compare our results to a microscopic model of magnetic spin defects located at the interfaces surrounding the SQUID loops. Our data are in agreement with an extension of the previously proposed model, based on numerical simulations of the current distribution in the investigated SQUIDs. Our results and detailed model provide a guide for minimizing the flux noise susceptibility in future circuits.
18
Feb
2020
High-contrast ZZ interaction using multi-type superconducting qubits
For building a scalable quantum processor with superconducting qubits, the ZZ interaction is of great concert because of relevant for implementing two-qubit gates, and the close contact
between gate infidelity and its residual. Two-qubit gates with fidelity beyond fault-tolerant thresholds have been demonstrated using the ZZ interaction. However, as the performance of quantum processor improves, the residual static-ZZ can also become a performance-limiting factor for quantum gate operations and quantum error correction. Here, we introduce a scalable superconducting architecture for addressing this challenge. We demonstrate that by coupling two superconducting qubits with opposite-sign anharmonicities together, high-contrast ZZ interaction can be realized in this architecture. Thus, we can control ZZ interaction with high on/off ratio for implementing two-qubit CZ gate, or suppress it during the two-qubit gate operations using XY interaction (e.g. iSWAP). Meanwhile, the ZZ crosstalk related to neighboring spectator qubits can also be heavily suppressed in fixed coupled multi-qubit systems. This architecture could provide a promising way towards scalable superconducting quantum processor with high gate fidelity and low qubit crosstalk.
Hardware-Encoding Grid States in a Non-Reciprocal Superconducting Circuit
We present a circuit design composed of a non-reciprocal device and Josephson junctions whose ground space is doubly degenerate and the ground states are approximate codewords of the
Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) code. We determine the low-energy dynamics of the circuit by working out the equivalence of this system to the problem of a single electron confined in a two-dimensional plane and under the effect of strong magnetic field and of a periodic potential. We find that the circuit is naturally protected against the common noise channels in superconducting circuits, such as charge and flux noise, implying that it can be used for passive quantum error correction. We also propose realistic design parameters for an experimental realization and we describe possible protocols to perform logical one- and two-qubit gates, state preparation and readout.
17
Feb
2020
Leakage detection for a transmon-based surface code
Leakage outside of the qubit computational subspace, present in many leading experimental platforms, constitutes a threatening error for quantum error correction (QEC) for qubits. We
develop a leakage-detection scheme via Hidden Markov models (HMMs) for transmon-based implementations of the surface code. By performing realistic density-matrix simulations of the distance-3 surface code (Surface-17), we observe that leakage is sharply projected and leads to an increase in the surface-code defect probability of neighboring stabilizers. Together with the analog readout of the ancilla qubits, this increase enables the accurate detection of the time and location of leakage. We restore the logical error rate below the memory break-even point by post-selecting out leakage, discarding about 47% of the data. Leakage detection via HMMs opens the prospect for near-term QEC demonstrations, targeted leakage reduction and leakage-aware decoding and is applicable to other experimental platforms.