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
11
Sep
2019
A semiclassical analysis of dark state transient dynamics in waveguide circuit QED
The interaction between superconducting qubits and one-dimensional microwave transmission lines has been studied experimentally and theoretically in the past two decades. In this work,
we investigate the spontaneous emission of an initially excited artificial atom which is capacitively coupled to a semi-infinite transmission line, shorted at one end. This configuration can be viewed as an atom in front of a mirror. The distance between the atom and the mirror introduces a time-delay in the system, which we take into account fully. When the delay time equals an integer number of atom oscillation periods, the atom converges into a dark state after an initial decay period. The dark state is an effect of destructive interference between the reflected part of the field and the part directly emitted by the atom. Based on circuit quantization, we derive linearized equations of motion for the system and use these for a semiclassical analysis of the transient dynamics. We also make a rigorous connection to the quantum optics system-reservoir approach and compare these two methods to describe the dynamics. We find that both approaches are equivalent for transmission lines with a low characteristic impedance, while they differ when this impedance is higher than the typical impedance of the superconducting artificial atom.
09
Sep
2019
Faithful Simulation and Detection of Quantum Spin Hall Effect on Superconducting Circuits
Topological states of quantum matter %, originally discovered and investigated in condensed matter physics, have inspired both fascinating physics findings and exciting opportunities
for applications. Due to the over-complicated structure of, as well as interactions between, real materials, a faithful quantum simulation of topological matter is very important in deepening our understanding of these states. This requirement puts the quantum superconducting circuits system as a good option for mimicking topological materials, owing to their flexible tunability and fine controllability. As a typical example herein, we realize a Z2-type topological insulator featuring the quantum spin Hall effect state, using a coupled system of transmission-line resonators and transmons. The single-excitation eigenstates of each unit cell are used as a pseudo-spin 1/2 system. Time reversal symmetry of the system is proved, and the boundary of the topological phase transition is fixed in the phase diagram. Topological edge states are shown, which can be experimentally verified by detecting the population at the boundary of the plane. Compared to the previous simulations, this compositional system is fairly controllable, stable and less limited. Therefore, our scheme provides a reliable platform for faithful quantum simulations of topological matter.
04
Sep
2019
Modelling of TM Modes in Periodically-Shorted Cavities for Circuit QED
Electromagnetic cavities are ubiquitous in superconducting quantum circuit research, employed to control a circuit’s electromagnetic environment, suppress radiative loss, and
implement functionalities such as qubit readout and inter-qubit coupling. Here we consider the case of a rectangular cavity shorted by a periodic array of conducting cylinders. This is a potential enclosure geometry for large-scale quantum chips with many qubits. We develop simple, accurate models for the TM modes of the cavity, over a wide range of cylinder spacing and radii, using a plasma model and a coupled cavity array circuit model. We compare predictions with finite-element simulation and find good agreement. We investigate inter-qubit couplings mediated by such cavities for circuits at the 100-qubit scale, and discuss additional applications to circuit QED.
Tunable three-body coupler for superconducting flux qubits
The implementation of many-body interactions is relevant in various areas of quantum information. We present a superconducting device that implements a strong and tunable three-body
interaction between superconducting quantum bits, with vanishing two-body interactions and robustness against noise and circuit parameter variations. These properties are confirmed by calculations based on the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, a two-level model for the coupling circuit, and numerical diagonalization. This circuit behaves as an ideal computational basis ZZZ coupler in a simulated three-qubit quantum annealing experiment. This work will be relevant for advanced quantum annealing protocols and future developments of high-order many-body interactions in quantum computers and simulators.
03
Sep
2019
Millimeter-Wave Four-Wave Mixing via Kinetic Inductance for Quantum Devices
Millimeter-wave superconducting devices offer a platform for quantum experiments at temperatures above 1 K, and new avenues for studying light-matter interactions in the strong coupling
regime. Using the intrinsic nonlinearity associated with kinetic inductance of thin film materials, we realize four-wave mixing at millimeter-wave frequencies, demonstrating a key component for superconducting quantum systems. We report on the performance of niobium nitride resonators around 100 GHz, patterned on thin (20-50 nm) films grown by atomic layer deposition, with sheet inductances up to 212 pH/square and critical temperatures up to 13.9 K. For films thicker than 20 nm, we measure quality factors from 1-6×104, likely limited by two-level systems. Finally we measure degenerate parametric conversion for a 95 GHz device with a forward efficiency up to +16 dB, paving the way for the development of nonlinear quantum devices at millimeter-wave frequencies.
30
Aug
2019
Methods for Measuring Magnetic Flux Crosstalk Between Tunable Transmons
In the gate model of quantum computing, a program is typically decomposed into a sequence of 1- and 2-qubit gates that are realized as control pulses acting on the system. A key requirement
for a scalable control system is that the qubits are addressable – that control pulses act only on the targeted qubits. The presence of control crosstalk makes this addressability requirement difficult to meet. In order to provide metrics that can drive requirements for decreasing crosstalk, we present three measurements that directly quantify the DC and AC flux crosstalk present between tunable transmons, with sensitivities as fine as 0.001%. We develop the theory to connect AC flux crosstalk measures to the infidelity of a parametrically activated two-qubit gate. We employ quantum process tomography in the presence of crosstalk to provide an empirical study of the effects of crosstalk on two-qubit gate fidelity.
29
Aug
2019
Assessing the Influence of Broadband Instrumentation Noise on Parametrically Modulated Superconducting Qubits
With superconducting transmon qubits — a promising platform for quantum information processing — two-qubit gates can be performed using AC signals to modulate a tunable
transmon’s frequency via magnetic flux through its SQUID loop. However, frequency tunablity introduces an additional dephasing mechanism from magnetic fluctuations. In this work, we experimentally study the contribution of instrumentation noise to flux instability and the resulting error rate of parametrically activated two-qubit gates. Specifically, we measure the qubit coherence time under flux modulation while injecting broadband noise through the flux control channel. We model the noise’s effect using a dephasing rate model that matches well to the measured rates, and use it to prescribe a noise floor required to achieve a desired two-qubit gate infidelity. Finally, we demonstrate that low-pass filtering the AC signal used to drive two-qubit gates between the first and second harmonic frequencies can reduce qubit sensitivity to flux noise at the AC sweet spot (ACSS), confirming an earlier theoretical prediction. The framework we present to determine instrumentation noise floors required for high entangling two-qubit gate fidelity should be extensible to other quantum information processing systems.
Onset of phase diffusion in high kinetic inductance granular aluminum micro-SQUIDs
Superconducting granular aluminum is attracting increasing interest due to its high kinetic inductance and low dissipation, favoring its use in kinetic inductance particle detectors,
superconducting resonators or quantum bits. We perform switching current measurements on DC-SQUIDs, obtained by introducing two identical geometric constrictions in granular aluminum rings of various normal-state resistivities in the range from ρn=250μΩcm to 5550μΩcm. The relative high kinetic inductance of the SQUID loop, in the range of tens of nH, leads to a suppression of the modulation in the measured switching current versus magnetic flux, accompanied by a distortion towards a triangular shape. We observe a change in the temperature dependence of the switching current histograms with increasing normal-state film resistivity. This behavior suggests the onset of a diffusive motion of the superconducting phase across the constrictions in the two-dimensional washboard potential of the SQUIDs, which could be caused by a change of the local electromagnetic environment of films with increasing normal-state resistivities.
27
Aug
2019
QuCAT: Quantum Circuit Analyzer Tool in Python
Quantum circuits constructed from Josephson junctions and superconducting electronics are key to many quantum computing and quantum optics applications. Designing these circuits involves
calculating the Hamiltonian describing their quantum behavior. Here we present QuCAT, or „Quantum Circuit Analyzer Tool“, an open-source framework to help in this task. This open-source Python library features an intuitive graphical or programmatical interface to create circuits, the ability to compute their Hamiltonian, and a set of complimentary functionalities such as calculating dissipation rates or visualizing current flow in the circuit.
Electric fields for light: Propagation of microwave photons along a synthetic dimension
The evenly-spaced modes of an electromagnetic resonator are coupled to each other by appropriate time-modulation, leading to dynamics analogous to those of particles hopping between
different sites of a lattice. This substitution of a real spatial dimension of a lattice with a „synthetic'“ dimension in frequency space greatly reduces the hardware complexity of an analog quantum simulator. Complex control and read-out of a highly multi-moded structure can thus be accomplished with very few physical control lines. We demonstrate this concept with microwave photons in a superconducting transmission line resonator by modulating the system parameters at frequencies near the resonator’s free spectral range and observing propagation of photon wavepackets in time domain. The linear propagation dynamics are equivalent to a tight-binding model, which we probe by measuring scattering parameters between frequency sites. We extract an approximate tight-binding dispersion relation for the synthetic lattice and initialize photon wavepackets with well-defined quasimomenta and group velocities. As an example application of this platform in simulating a physical system, we demonstrate Bloch oscillations associated with a particle in a periodic potential and subject to a constant external field. The simulated field strongly affects the photon dynamics despite photons having zero charge. Our observation of photon dynamics along a synthetic frequency dimension generalizes immediately to topological photonics and single-photon power levels, and expands the range of physical systems addressable by quantum simulation.