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
2019
A 28nm Bulk-CMOS 4-to-8GHz <2mW Cryogenic Pulse Modulator for Scalable Quantum Computing
Future quantum computing systems will require cryogenic integrated circuits to control and measure millions of qubits. In this paper, we report the design and characterization of a
prototype cryogenic CMOS integrated circuit that has been optimized for the control of transmon qubits. The circuit has been integrated into a quantum measurement setup and its performance has been validated through multiple quantum control experiments.
Deterministic entanglement swapping in a superconducting circuit
Entanglement swapping allows two particles that have never been coupled directly or indirectly to be nonlocally correlated. Besides fundamental interest, this procedure has applications
in complex entanglement manipulation and quantum communication. Entanglement swapping for qubits has been demonstrated in optical experiments, but where the process was conditional on detection of preset photon coincidence events, which succeeded with only a small probability. Here we report an unconditional entanglement swapping experiment with superconducting qubits. Using controllable qubit-qubit couplings mediated by a resonator, we prepare two highly entangled qubit pairs and then perform the Bell state measurement on two qubits coming from different entangled pairs, projecting the remaining two qubits to one of four Bell states. The measured concurrences for these Bell states are above 0.75,demonstrating the quantum nature of entanglement swapping. With this setup, we further demonstrate delayed-choice entanglement swapping, confirming whether two qubits behaved as in an entangled state or as in a separate state is determined by a later choice of the type of measurement on their partners. This is the first demonstration of entanglement-separability duality in a deterministic way, closing the detection loophole the previous experiments suffer from.
Error Mitigation by Symmetry Verification on a Variational Quantum Eigensolver
Variational quantum eigensolvers offer a small-scale testbed to demonstrate the performance of error mitigation techniques with low experimental overhead. We present successful error
mitigation by applying the recently proposed symmetry verification technique to the experimental estimation of the ground-state energy and ground state of the hydrogen molecule. A finely adjustable exchange interaction between two qubits in a circuit QED processor efficiently prepares variational ansatz states in the single-excitation subspace respecting the parity symmetry of the qubit-mapped Hamiltonian. Symmetry verification improves the energy and state estimates by mitigating the effects of qubit relaxation and residual qubit excitation, which violate the symmetry. A full-density-matrix simulation matching the experiment dissects the contribution of these mechanisms from other calibrated error sources. Enforcing positivity of the measured density matrix via scalable convex optimization correlates the energy and state estimate improvements when using symmetry verification, with interesting implications for determining system properties beyond the ground-state energy.
27
Feb
2019
Kerr-free three-wave mixing in superconducting quantum circuits
Quantum-limited Josephson parametric amplifiers are crucial components in circuit QED readout chains. The dynamic range of state-of-the-art parametric amplifiers is limited by signal-induced
Stark shifts that detune the amplifier from its operating point. Using a Superconducting Nonlinear Asymmetric Inductive eLement (SNAIL) as an active component, we show the ability to in situ tune the device flux and pump to a dressed Kerr-free operating point, which provides a 10-fold increase in the number of photons that can be processed by our amplifier, compared to the nominal working point. Our proposed and experimentally verified methodology of Kerr-free three-wave mixing can be extended to improve the dynamic range of other pumped operations in quantum superconducting circuits.
Catching and Reversing a Quantum Jump Mid-Flight
A quantum system driven by a weak deterministic force while under strong continuous energy measurement exhibits quantum jumps between its energy levels (Nagourney et al., 1986, Sauter
et al., 1986, Bergquist et al., 1986). This celebrated phenomenon is emblematic of the special nature of randomness in quantum physics. The times at which the jumps occur are reputed to be fundamentally unpredictable. However, certain classical phenomena, like tsunamis, while unpredictable in the long term, may possess a degree of predictability in the short term, and in some cases it may be possible to prevent a disaster by detecting an advance warning signal. Can there be, despite the indeterminism of quantum physics, a possibility to know if a quantum jump is about to occur or not? In this dissertation, we answer this question affirmatively by experimentally demonstrating that the completed jump from the ground to an excited state of a superconducting artificial atom can be tracked, as it follows its predictable „flight,“ by monitoring the population of an auxiliary level coupled to the ground state. Furthermore, the experimental results demonstrate that the jump when completed is continuous, coherent, and deterministic. Exploiting these features, we catch and reverse a quantum jump mid-flight, thus deterministically preventing its completion. This real-time intervention is based on a particular lull period in the population of the auxiliary level, which serves as our advance warning signal. Our results, which agree with theoretical predictions essentially without adjustable parameters, support the modern quantum trajectory theory and provide new ground for the exploration of real-time intervention techniques in the control of quantum systems, such as early detection of error syndromes.
An efficient protocol of quantum walk in circuit QED
Implementation of discrete-time quantum walk (DTQW) with superconducting qubits is difficult since on-chip superconducting qubits cannot hop between lattice sites. We propose an efficient
protocol for the implementation of DTQW in circuit quantum electrodynamics (QED), in which only N+1 qutrits and N assistant cavities are needed for an N-step DTQW. The operation of each DTQW step is very quick because only resonant processes are adopted. The numerical simulations show that high-similarity DTQW with the number of step up to 20 is feasible with present-day circuit QED technique. This protocol can help to study properties and applications of large-step DTQW in experiments, which is important for the development of quantum computation and quantum simulation in circuit QED.
25
Feb
2019
Operation and intrinsic error budget of two-qubit cross-resonance gate
We analyze analytically, semi-analytically, and numerically the operation of Cross-Resonance (CR) gate for superconducting qubits (transmons). We find that a relatively simple semi-analytical
method gives accurate results for the CNOT-equivalent gate duration and compensating single-qubit rotations. It also allows us to minimize the CNOT gate duration over the amplitude of the applied microwave drive and find dependence on the detuning between the qubits. However, full numerical simulations are needed to calculate intrinsic fidelity of the CR gate. We decompose numerical infidelity into contributions from various physical mechanisms, thus finding the intrinsic error budget. In particular, at small drive amplitudes the CR gate fidelity is limited by unitary imperfections, while at large amplitudes it is limited by leakage. The gate duration and fidelity are analyzed numerically as functions of the detuning between qubits, their coupling, drive frequency, relative duration of pulse ramps, and microwave crosstalk. Our results show that the CR gate can provide intrinsic infidelity of less than 10−3 when a simple pulse shape is used.
22
Feb
2019
Development of transmon qubits solely from optical lithography on 300mm wafers
Qubit information processors are increasing in footprint but currently rely on e-beam lithography for patterning the required Josephson junctions (JJs). Advanced optical lithography
is an alternative patterning method, and we report on the development of transmon qubits patterned solely with optical lithography. The lithography uses 193 nm wavelength exposure and 300-mm large silicon wafers. Qubits and arrays of evaluation JJs were patterned with process control which resulted in narrow feature distributions: a standard deviation of 0:78% for a 220 nm linewidth pattern realized across over half the width of the wafers. Room temperature evaluation found a 2.8-3.6% standard deviation in JJ resistance in completed chips. The qubits used aluminum and titanium nitride films on silicon substrates without substantial silicon etching. T1 times of the qubits were extracted at 26 – 27 microseconds, indicating a low level of material-based qubit defects. This study shows that large wafer optical lithography on silicon is adequate for high-quality transmon qubits, and shows a promising path for improving many-qubit processors.
21
Feb
2019
Pseudo-2D superconducting quantum computing circuit for the surface code
Of the many potential hardware platforms, superconducting quantum circuits have become the leading contender for constructing a scalable quantum computing system. All current architecture
designs necessitate a 2D arrangement of superconducting qubits with nearest neighbour interactions, compatible with powerful quantum error correction using the surface code. A major hurdle for scalability in superconducting systems is the so called wiring problem, where qubits internal to a chip-set become inaccessible for external control/readout lines. Current approaches resort to intricate and exotic 3D wiring and packaging technology which is a significant engineering challenge to realize, while maintaining qubit fidelity. Here we solve this problem and present a modified superconducting scalable micro-architecture that does not require any 3D external line technology and reverts back to a completely planar design. This is enabled by a new pseudo-2D resonator network that provides inter-qubit connections via airbridges. We carried out experiments to examine the feasibility of the newly introduced airbridge component. The measured quality factor of these new inter-qubit resonators is sufficient for high fidelity gates, below the threshold for the surface code, with negligible measured cross-talk. The resulting physical separation of the external wirings and the inter-qubit connections on-chip should reduce cross-talk and decoherence as the chip-set increases in size. This result demonstrates that a large-scale, fully error corrected quantum computer can be constructed by monolithic integration technologies without additional overhead and without special packaging know-hows.
Minimal Time Robust Two Qubit Gates in Circuit QED
Fault tolerant quantum computing requires quantum gates with high fidelity. Incoherent errors reduce the fidelities of quantum gates when the operation time is too long. Optimal control
techniques can be used to decrease the operation time in theory, but generally do not take into account the realistic nature of uncertainty regarding the system parameters. We apply robust optimal control techniques to demonstrate that it is feasible to reduce the operation time of the cross-resonance gate in superconducting systems to under 100\,ns with two-qubit gate fidelities of F>0.99, where the gate fidelity will not be coherence limited. This is while ensuring robustness for up to 10\% uncertainty in the system, and having chosen a parameterization that aides in experimental feasibility. We find that the highest fidelity gates can be achieved in the shortest time for the transmon qubits compared with a two-level flux qubit system. This suggests that the third-level of the transmon may be useful for achieving shorter cross-resonance gate times with high fidelity. The results further indicate a speed limit for experimentally feasible pulses with the inclusion of robustness and the maximum amount of uncertainty allowable to achieve fidelities with F>0.999.