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
03
Aug
2019
Lifetime renormalization of driven weakly anharmonic superconducting qubits: II. The readout problem
Recent experiments in superconducting qubit systems have shown an unexpectedly strong dependence of the qubit relaxation rate on the readout drive power. This phenomenon limits the
maximum measurement strength and thus the achievable readout speed and fidelity. We address this problem here and provide a plausible mechanism for drive-power dependence of relaxation rates. To this end we introduce a two-parameter perturbative expansion in qubit anharmonicity and the drive amplitude through a unitary transformation technique introduced in Part I. This approach naturally reveals number non-conserving terms in the Josephson potential as a fundamental mechanism through which applied microwave drives can activate additional relaxation mechanisms. We present our results in terms of an effective master equation with renormalized state- and drive-dependent transition frequency and relaxation rates. Comparison of numerical results from this effective master equation to those obtained from a Lindblad master equation which only includes number-conserving terms (i.e. Kerr interactions) shows that number non-conserving terms can lead to significant drive-power dependence of the relaxation rates. The systematic expansion technique introduced here is of general applicability to obtaining effective master equations for driven-dissipative quantum systems that contain weakly non-linear degrees of freedom.
02
Aug
2019
Machine-learning based three-qubit gate for realization of a Toffoli gate with cQED-based transmon systems
We use machine learning techniques to design a 50 ns three-qubit flux-tunable controlled-controlled-phase gate with fidelity of >99.99% for nearest-neighbor coupled transmons in circuit
quantum electrodynamics architectures. We explain our gate design procedure where we enforce realistic constraints, and analyze the new gate’s robustness under decoherence, distortion, and random noise. Our controlled-controlled-phase gate in combination with two single-qubit gates realizes a Toffoli gate which is widely used in quantum circuits, logic synthesis, quantum error correction, and quantum games.
01
Aug
2019
Chiral Magnetic Josephson junction: a base for low-noise superconducting qubits?
Superconducting materials with non-centrosymmetric lattices lacking the space inversion symmetry are known to exhibit a variety of interesting parity-breaking phenomena, including the
anomalous Josephson effect. Here we consider a Josephson junction consisting of two non-centrosymmetric superconductors (NCSs) connected by a uniaxial ferromagnet, and demonstrate that it exhibits a direct analog of the Chiral Magnetic Effect observed in Dirac and Weyl semimetals. We propose to use this „Chiral Magnetic Josephson junction“ (CMJ junction) as an element of a qubit with a Hamiltonian tunable by the ferromagnet’s magnetization. The CMJ junction allows to avoid the use of an offset magnetic flux in inductively shunted qubits, thus enabling a simpler and more robust architecture. The resulting“`chiral magnetic qubit“ is protected from the noise caused by fluctuations in magnetization when the easy axis of the uniaxial ferromagnet is directed across the junction.
31
Jul
2019
Critical slowing down in the bistable regime of circuit quantum electrodynamics
We investigate the dynamics of the bistable regime of the generalized Jaynes-Cummings Hamiltonian (GJC), realised by a circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) system consisting of a
transmon qubit coupled to a microwave cavity. In this regime we observe critical slowing down in the approach to the steady state. By measuring the response of the cavity to a step function drive pulse we characterize this slowing down as a function of driving frequency and power. We find that the critical slowing down saturates as the driving power is increased. We compare these results with the predictions of analytical and numerical calculations both with and without the Duffing approximation. We find that the Duffing approximation incorrectly predicts that the critical slowing down timescale increases exponentially with the drive, whereas the GJC model accurately predicts the saturation seen in our data, suggesting a different process of quantum activation.
30
Jul
2019
Silicon Hard-Stop Spacers for 3D Integration of Superconducting Qubits
As designs for superconducting qubits become more complex, 3D integration of two or more vertically bonded chips will become necessary to enable increased density and connectivity.
Precise control of the spacing between these chips is required for accurate prediction of circuit performance. In this paper, we demonstrate an improvement in the planarity of bonded superconducting qubit chips while retaining device performance by utilizing hard-stop silicon spacer posts. These silicon spacers are defined by etching several microns into a silicon substrate and are compatible with 3D-integrated qubit fabrication. This includes fabrication of Josephson junctions, superconducting air-bridge crossovers, underbump metallization and indium bumps. To qualify the integrated process, we demonstrate high-quality factor resonators on the etched surface and measure qubit coherence (T1, T2,echo > 40 {\mu}s) in the presence of silicon posts as near as 350 {\mu}m to the qubit.
Generation and controllable switching of superradiant and subradiant states in a 10-qubit superconducting circuit
Superradiance and subradiance concerning enhanced and inhibited collective radiation of an ensemble of atoms have been a central topic in quantum optics. However, precise generation
and control of these states remain challenging. Here we deterministically generate up to 10-qubit superradiant and 8-qubit subradiant states, each containing a single excitation, in a superconducting quantum circuit with multiple qubits interconnected by a cavity resonator. The N−−√-scaling enhancement of the coupling strength between the superradiant states and the cavity is validated. By applying appropriate phase gate on each qubit, we are able to switch the single collective excitation between superradiant and subradiant states. While the subradiant states containing a single excitation are forbidden from emitting photons, we demonstrate that they can still absorb photons from the resonator. However, for even number of qubits, a singlet state with half of the qubits being excited can neither emit nor absorb photons, which is verified with 4 qubits. This study is a step forward in coherent control of collective radiation and has promising applications in quantum information processing.
29
Jul
2019
A stabilized logical quantum bit encoded in grid states of a superconducting cavity
The majority of quantum information tasks require error-corrected logical qubits whose coherence times are vastly longer than that of currently available physical qubits. Among the
many quantum error correction codes, bosonic codes are particularly attractive as they make use of a single quantum harmonic oscillator to encode a correctable qubit in a hardware-efficient manner. One such encoding, based on grid states of an oscillator, has the potential to protect a logical qubit against all major physical noise processes. By stroboscopically modulating the interaction of a superconducting microwave cavity with an ancillary transmon, we have successfully prepared and permanently stabilized these grid states. The lifetimes of the three Bloch vector components of the encoded qubit are enhanced by the application of this protocol, and agree with a theoretical estimate based on the measured imperfections of the experiment.
Error-corrected gates on an encoded qubit
To solve classically hard problems, quantum computers need to be resilient to the influence of noise and decoherence. In such a fault-tolerant quantum computer, noise-induced errors
must be detected and corrected in real-time to prevent them from propagating between components. This requirement is especially pertinent while applying quantum gates, when the interaction between components can cause errors to quickly spread throughout the system. However, the large overhead involved in most fault-tolerant architectures makes implementing these systems a daunting task, which motivates the search for hardware-efficient alternatives. Here, we present a gate enacted by a multilevel ancilla transmon on a cavity-encoded logical qubit that is fault-tolerant with respect to decoherence in both the ancilla and the encoded qubit. We maintain the purity of the encoded qubit in the presence of ancilla errors by detecting those errors in real-time, and applying the appropriate corrections. We show a reduction of the logical gate error by a factor of two in the presence of naturally occurring decoherence, and demonstrate resilience against ancilla bit-flips and phase-flips by observing a sixfold suppression of the gate error with increased energy relaxation, and a fourfold suppression with increased dephasing noise. The results demonstrate that bosonic logical qubits can be controlled by error-prone ancilla qubits without inheriting the ancilla’s inferior performance. As such, error-corrected ancilla-enabled gates are an important step towards fully fault-tolerant processing of bosonic qubits.
28
Jul
2019
The Kerr-Cat Qubit: Stabilization, Readout, and Gates
Quantum superpositions of macroscopically distinct classical states, so-called Schrödinger cat states, are a resource for quantum metrology, quantum communication, and quantum computation.
In particular, the superpositions of two opposite-phase coherent states in an oscillator encode a qubit protected against phase-flip errors. However, several challenges have to be overcome in order for this concept to become a practical way to encode and manipulate error-protected quantum information. The protection must be maintained by stabilizing these highly excited states and, at the same time, the system has to be compatible with fast gates on the encoded qubit and a quantum non-demolition readout of the encoded information. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a novel method for the generation and stabilization of Schrödinger cat states based on the interplay between Kerr nonlinearity and single-mode squeezing in a superconducting microwave resonator. We show an increase in transverse relaxation time of the stabilized, error-protected qubit over the single-photon Fock-state encoding by more than one order of magnitude. We perform all single-qubit gate operations on time-scales more than sixty times faster than the shortest coherence time and demonstrate single-shot readout of the protected qubit under stabilization. Our results showcase the combination of fast quantum control with the robustness against errors intrinsic to stabilized macroscopic states and open up the possibility of using these states as resources in quantum information processing.
26
Jul
2019
Exponential suppression of bit-flips in a qubit encoded in an oscillator
A quantum system interacts with its environment, if ever so slightly, no matter how much care is put into isolating it. As a consequence, quantum bits (qubits) undergo errors, putting
dauntingly difficult constraints on the hardware suitable for quantum computation. New strategies are emerging to circumvent this problem by encoding a qubit non-locally across the phase space of a physical system. Since most sources of decoherence are due to local fluctuations, the foundational promise is to exponentially suppress errors by increasing a measure of this non-locality. Prominent examples are topological qubits which delocalize quantum information over real space and where spatial extent measures non-locality. In this work, we encode a qubit in the field quadrature space of a superconducting resonator endowed with a special mechanism that dissipates photons in pairs. This process pins down two computational states to separate locations in phase space. As we increase this separation, we measure an exponential decrease of the bit-flip rate while only linearly increasing the phase-flip rate. Since bit-flips are continuously and autonomously corrected at the single qubit level, only phase-flips are left to be corrected via a one-dimensional quantum error correction code. This exponential scaling demonstrates that resonators with non-linear dissipation are promising building blocks for universal fault-tolerant quantum computation with drastically reduced hardware overhead.