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
15
Mai
2017
Correlations and entanglement of microwave photons emitted in a cascade decay
An excited emitter decays by radiating a photon into a quantized mode of the electromagnetic field, a process known as spontaneous emission. If the emitter is driven to a higher excited
state, it radiates multiple photons in a cascade decay. Atomic and biexciton cascades have been exploited as sources of polarization-entangled photon pairs. Because the photons are emitted sequentially, their intensities are strongly correlated in time, as measured in a double-beam coincidence experiment. Perhaps less intuitively, their phases can also be correlated, provided a single emitter is deterministically prepared into a superposition state, and the emitted radiation is detected in a phase-sensitive manner and with high efficiency. Here we have met these requirements by using a superconducting artificial atom, coherently driven to its second-excited state and decaying into a well-defined microwave mode. Our results highlight the coherent nature of cascade decay and demonstrate a novel protocol to generate entanglement between itinerant field modes.
Dissipative Landau-Zener problem and thermally assisted quantum annealing
We revisit the issue of thermally assisted quantum annealing by a detailed study of the dissipative Landau-Zener problem in presence of a Caldeira-Leggett bath of harmonic oscillators,
using both a weak-coupling quantum master equation and a quasi-adiabatic path-integral approach. Building on the known zero-temperature exact results (Wubs et al., PRL 97, 200404 (2006)), we show that a finite temperature bath can have a beneficial effect on the ground-state probability only if it couples also to a spin-direction that is transverse with respect to the driving field, while no improvement is obtained for the more commonly studied purely longitudinal coupling. In particular, we also highlight that, for a transverse coupling, raising the bath temperature further improves the ground-state probability in the fast-driving regime. We discuss the relevance of these findings for the current quantum-annealing flux qubit chips.
10
Mai
2017
Linear feedback stabilization of a dispersively monitored qubit
The state of a continuously monitored qubit evolves stochastically, exhibiting competition between coherent Hamiltonian dynamics and diffusive partial collapse dynamics that follow
the measurement record. We couple these distinct types of dynamics together by linearly feeding the collected record for dispersive energy measurements directly back into a coherent Rabi drive amplitude. Such feedback turns the competition cooperative, and effectively stabilizes the qubit state near a target state. We derive the conditions for obtaining such dispersive state stabilization and verify the stabilization conditions numerically. We include common experimental nonidealities, such as energy decay, environmental dephasing, detector efficiency, and feedback delay, and show that the feedback delay has the most significant negative effect on the feedback protocol. Setting the measurement collapse timescale to be long compared to the feedback delay yields the best stabilization.
08
Mai
2017
Traveling-wave parametric amplifier based on three-wave mixing in a Josephson metamaterial
. The amplifier consists"]of a microwave transmission line formed by a serial array of nonhysteretic one-junction SQUIDs. These SQUIDs are flux-biased in a way that the phase drops across the Josephson junctions are equal to 90 degrees and the persistent currents in the SQUID loops are equal to the Josephson critical current values. Such a one-dimensional metamaterial possesses a maximal quadratic nonlinearity and zero cubic (Kerr) nonlinearity. This property allows phase matching and exponential power gain of traveling microwaves to take place over a wide frequency range. We report the proof-of-principle experiment performed at a temperature of T = 4.2 K on Nb trilayer samples, which has demonstrated that our concept of a practical broadband Josephson parametric amplifier is valid and very promising for achieving quantum-limited operation.
07
Mai
2017
Extensible 3D architecture for superconducting quantum computing
Using a multi-layered printed circuit board, we propose a 3D architecture suitable for packaging supercon- ducting chips, especially chips that contain two-dimensional qubit arrays.
In our proposed architecture, the center strips of the buried coplanar waveguides protrude from the surface of a dielectric layer as contacts. Since the contacts extend beyond the surface of the dielectric layer, chips can simply be flip-chip packaged with on-chip receptacles clinging to the contacts. Using this scheme, we packaged a multi-qubit chip and per- formed single-qubit and two-qubit quantum gate operations. The results indicate that this 3D architecture provides a promising scheme for scalable quantum computing.
06
Mai
2017
Thermocompression Bonding Technology for Multilayer Superconducting Quantum Circuits
Extensible quantum computing architectures require a large array of quantum devices operating with low error rates. A quantum processor based on superconducting quantum bits can be
scaled up by stacking microchips that each perform different computational functions. In this article, we experimentally demonstrate a thermocompression bonding technology that utilizes indium films as a welding agent to attach pairs of lithographically-patterned chips. We perform chip-to-chip indium bonding in vacuum at 190∘C with indium film thicknesses of 150nm. We characterize the dc and microwave performance of bonded devices at room and cryogenic temperatures. At 10mK, we find a dc bond resistance of 515nΩmm2. Additionally, we show minimal microwave reflections and good transmission up to 6.8GHz in a tunnel-capped, bonded device as compared to a similar uncapped device. As a proof of concept, we fabricate and measure a set of tunnel-capped superconducting resonators, demonstrating that our bonding technology can be used in quantum computing applications.
05
Mai
2017
Coherent oscillations in a quantum manifold stabilized by dissipation
The quantum Zeno effect (QZE) is the apparent freezing of a quantum system in one state under the influence of a continuous observation. It has been further generalized to the stabilization
of a manifold spanned by multiple quantum states. In that case, motion inside the manifold can subsist and can even be driven by the combination of a dissipative stabilization and an external force. A superconducting microwave cavity that exchanges pairs of photons with its environments constitutes an example of a system which displays a stabilized manifold spanned by Schr\“odinger cat states. For this driven-dissipative system, the quantum Zeno stabilization transforms a simple linear drive into photon number parity oscillations within the stable cat state manifold. Without this stabilization, the linear drive would trivially displace the oscillator state and push it outside of the manifold. However, the observation of this effect is experimentally challenging. On one hand, the adiabaticity condition requires the oscillations to be slow compared to the manifold stabilization rate. On the other hand, the oscillations have to be fast compared with the coherence timescales within the stabilized manifold. Here, we implement the stabilization of a manifold spanned by Schr\“odinger cat states at a rate that exceeds the main source of decoherence by two orders of magnitude, and we show Zeno-driven coherent oscillations within this manifold. While related driven manifold dynamics have been proposed and observed, the non-linear dissipation specific to our experiment adds a crucial element: any drift out of the cat state manifold is projected back into it. The coherent oscillations of parity observed in this work are analogous to the Rabi rotation of a qubit protected against phase-flips and are likely to become part of the toolbox in the construction of a fault-tolerant logical qubit.
04
Mai
2017
Reverse isolation and backaction of the SLUG microwave amplifier
An ideal preamplifier for qubit measurement must not only provide high gain and near quantum-limited noise performance, but also isolate the delicate quantum circuit from noisy downstream
measurement stages while producing negligible backaction. Here we use a Superconducting Low-inductance Undulatory Galvanometer (SLUG) microwave amplifier to read out a superconducting transmon qubit, and we characterize both reverse isolation and measurement backaction of the SLUG. For appropriate dc bias, the SLUG achieves reverse isolation that is better than that of a commercial cryogenic isolator. Moreover, SLUG backaction is dominated by thermal emission from dissipative elements in the device. When the SLUG is operated in pulsed mode, it is possible to characterize the transmon qubit using a measurement chain that is free from cryogenic isolators or circulators with no measurable degradation of qubit performance.
02
Mai
2017
Towards understanding two-level-systems in amorphous solids – Insights from quantum devices
Amorphous solids show surprisingly universal behaviour at low temperatures. The prevailing wisdom is that this can be explained by the existence of two-state defects within the material.
The so-called standard tunneling model has become the established framework to explain these results, yet it still leaves the central question essentially unanswered – what are these two-level defects? This question has recently taken on a new urgency with the rise of superconducting circuits in quantum computing, circuit quantum electrodynamics, magnetometry, electrometry and metrology. Superconducting circuits made from aluminium or niobium are fundamentally limited by losses due to two-level defects within the amorphous oxide layers encasing them. On the other hand, these circuits also provide a novel and effective method for studying the very defects which limit their operation. We can now go beyond ensemble measurements and probe individual defects – observing the quantum nature of their dynamics and studying their formation, their behaviour as a function of applied field, strain, temperature and other properties. This article reviews the plethora of recent experimental results in this area and discusses the various theoretical models which have been used to describe the observations. In doing so, it summarises the current approaches to solving this fundamentally important problem in solid-state physics.
01
Mai
2017
Random access quantum information processors
Qubit connectivity is an important property of a quantum processor, with an ideal processor having random access — the ability of arbitrary qubit pairs to interact directly. Here,
we implement a random access superconducting quantum information processor, demonstrating universal operations on a nine-bit quantum memory, with a single transmon serving as the central processor. The quantum memory uses the eigenmodes of a linear array of coupled superconducting resonators. The memory bits are superpositions of vacuum and single-photon states, controlled by a single superconducting transmon coupled to the edge of the array. We selectively stimulate single-photon vacuum Rabi oscillations between the transmon and individual eigenmodes through parametric flux modulation of the transmon frequency, producing sidebands resonant with the modes. Utilizing these oscillations for state transfer, we perform a universal set of single- and two-qubit gates between arbitrary pairs of modes, using only the charge and flux bias of the transmon. Further, we prepare multimode entangled Bell and GHZ states of arbitrary modes. The fast and flexible control, achieved with efficient use of cryogenic resources and control electronics, in a scalable architecture compatible with state-of-the-art quantum memories is promising for quantum computation and simulation.