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
22
Sep
2016
Quantum annealing with a network of all-to-all connected, two-photon driven Kerr nonlinear oscillators
Quantum annealing aims to solve combinatorial optimization problems mapped on to Ising interactions between quantum spins. A critical factor that limits the success of a quantum annealer
is its sensitivity to noise, and intensive research is consequently focussed towards developing noise-resilient annealers. Here we propose a new paradigm for quantum annealing with a scalable network of all-to-all connected, two-photon driven Kerr-nonlinear resonators. Each of these resonators encode an Ising spin in a robust degenerate subspace formed by two coherent states of opposite phases. The fully-connected optimization problem is mapped onto local fields driving the resonators, which are themselves connected by local four-body interactions. We describe an adiabatic annealing protocol in this system and analyze its performance in the presence of photon loss. Numerical simulations indicate substantial resilience to this noise channel, making it a promising platform for implementing a large scale quantum Ising machine. Finally, we propose a realistic implementation of this scheme in circuit QED.
Multiplexing Superconducting Qubit Circuit for Single Microwave Photon Generation
We report on a device that integrates eight superconducting transmon qubits in lambda/4 superconducting coplanar waveguide resonators fed from a common feedline. Using this multiplexing
architecture, each resonator and qubit can be addressed individually thus reducing the required hardware resources and allowing their individual characterisation by spectroscopic methods. The measured device parameters agree with the designed values and the resonators and qubits exhibit excellent coherence properties and strong coupling, with the qubit relaxation rate dominated by the Purcell effect when brought in resonance with the resonator. Our analysis shows that the circuit is suitable for generation of single microwave photons on demand with an efficiency exceeding 80%.
20
Sep
2016
Cat codes with optimal decoherence suppression for a lossy bosonic channel
We investigate cat codes that can correct multiple excitation losses and identify two types of logical errors: bit-flip errors due to excessive excitation loss and dephasing errors
due to quantum back-action from the environment. We show that selected choices of logical subspace and coherent amplitude can efficiently reduce dephasing errors. The trade-off between the two major errors enables optimized performance of cat codes in terms of minimized decoherence. With high coupling efficiency, we show that one-way quantum repeaters with cat codes feature drastically boosted secure communication rate per mode compared with conventional encoding schemes, and thus showcase the promising potential of quantum information processing with continuous variable quantum codes.
19
Sep
2016
Leggett-Garg test of superconducting qubit addressing the clumsiness loophole
The Leggett-Garg inequality holds for any macrorealistic system that is being measured noninvasively. A violation of the inequality can signal that a system does not conform to our
primal intuition about the physical world. Alternatively, a violation can simply indicate that „clumsy“ experimental technique led to invasive measurements. Here, we consider a recent Leggett-Garg test designed to try to rule out the mundane second possibility. We tailor this Leggett-Garg test to the IBM 5Q Quantum Experience system and find compelling evidence that qubit Q2 of the system cannot be described by noninvasive macrorealism.
15
Sep
2016
Direct identification of dilute surface spins on Al2O3: Origin of flux noise in quantum circuits
It is universally accepted that noise and decoherence affecting the performance of superconducting quantum circuits are consistent with the presence of spurious two-level systems (TLS).
In recent years bulk defects have been generally ruled out as the dominant source, and the search has focused on surfaces and interfaces. Despite a wide range of theoretical models and experimental efforts, the origin of these surface TLS still remains largely unknown, making further mitigation of TLS induced decoherence extremely challenging. Here we use a recently developed on-chip electron spin resonance (ESR) technique that allows us to detect spins with a very low surface coverage. We combine this technique with various surface treatments specifically to reveal the nature of native surface spins on Al2O3 — the mainstay of almost all solid state quantum devices. On a large number of samples we resolve three ESR peaks with the measured total paramagnetic spin density n=2.2×1017m−2, which matches the density inferred from the flux noise in SQUIDs. We show that two of these peaks originate from physisorbed atomic hydrogen which appears on the surface as a by-product of water dissociation. We suggest that the third peak is due to molecular oxygen on the Al2O3 surface captured at strong Lewis base defect sites, producing charged O−2. These results provide important information towards the origin of charge and flux noise in quantum circuits. Our findings open up a whole new approach to identification and controlled reduction of paramagnetic sources of noise in solid state quantum devices.
11
Sep
2016
Resonator reset in circuit QED by optimal control for large open quantum systems
We study an implementation of the open GRAPE (Gradient Ascent Pulse Engineering) algorithm well suited for large open quantum systems. While typical implementations of optimal control
algorithms for open quantum systems rely on a transformation to Liouville space, our implementation avoid this transformation which leads to a polynomial speed-up of the open GRAPE algorithm in cases of interest. As an example, we apply our implementation to active reset of a readout resonator in circuit QED. In this problem, the shape of a microwave pulse is optimized to steer the cavity state towards its ground state as fast as possible. Using our open GRAPE implementation, we obtain pulse shapes leading to a reset time over four times faster than typical passive reset.
08
Sep
2016
Quantum-assisted learning of graphical models with arbitrary pairwise connectivity
There is increasing interest in the potential advantages of using quantum computing technologies as sampling engines to speedup machine learning and probabilistic programming tasks.
However, some pressing challenges in state-of-the-art quantum annealers have to be overcome before we can assess their actual performance. Most notably, the effective temperature at which samples are generated is instance-dependent and unknown, the interaction graph is sparse, the parameters are noisy, and the dynamic range of the parameters is finite. Of all these limitations, the sparse connectivity resulting from the local interaction between quantum bits in physical hardware implementations, is considered the most severe limitation to the quality of constructing powerful machine learning models. Here we show how to surpass this „curse of limited connectivity“ bottleneck and illustrate our findings by training probabilistic generative models with arbitrary pairwise connectivity. Our model can be trained in quantum hardware without full knowledge of the effective parameters specifying the corresponding Boltzmann-like distribution. Therefore, inference of the effective temperature is avoided and the effect of noise in the parameters is mitigated. We illustrate our findings by successfully training hardware-embedded models with all-to-all connectivity on a real dataset of handwritten digits and two synthetic datasets. In each of these datasets we show the generative capabilities of the models learned with the assistance of the quantum annealer in experiments with up to 940 quantum bits. Additionally, we show a visual Turing test with handwritten digit data, where the machine generating the digits is a quantum processor. Such digits, with a remarkable similarity to those generated by humans, are extracted from the experiments with 940 quantum bits.
01
Sep
2016
Time-multiplexed amplification in a hybrid-less and coil-less Josephson parametric converter
Josephson parametric converters (JPCs) are superconducting devices capable of performing nondegenerate, three-wave mixing in the microwave domain without losses. One drawback limiting
their use in scalable quantum architectures is the large footprint of the auxiliary circuit needed for their operation, in particular, the use of off-chip, bulky, broadband hybrids and magnetic coils. Here, we realize a JPC which eliminates the need for these bulky components. The pump drive and flux bias are applied in the new device through an on-chip, lossless, three-port power divider and on-chip flux line, respectively. We show that the new design considerably simplifies the circuit and reduces the footprint of the device while maintaining a comparable performance to state-of-the-art JPCs. Furthermore, we exploit the tunable bandwidth property of the JPC and the added capability of applying alternating currents to the flux line in order to switch the resonance frequencies of the device, hence demonstrating time-multiplexed amplification of microwave tones that are separated by more than the dynamical bandwidth of the amplifier. Such a measurement technique can potentially serve to perform time-multiplexed, high-fidelity readout of superconducting qubits.
Non-Markovian dynamics of a superconducting qubit in an open multimode resonator
We study the dynamics of a transmon qubit that is capacitively coupled to an open multimode superconducting resonator. Our effective equations are derived by eliminating resonator degrees
of freedom while encoding their effect in the Green’s function of the electromagnetic background. We account for the dissipation of the resonator exactly by employing a spectral representation for the Green’s function in terms of a set of non-Hermitian modes and show that it is possible to derive effective Heisenberg-Langevin equations without resorting to the rotating wave, two level or Markov approximations. A well-behaved time domain perturbation theory is derived to systematically account for the nonlinearity of the transmon. We apply this method to the problem of spontaneous emission, capturing accurately the non-Markovian features of the qubit dynamics, valid for any qubit-resonator coupling strength.
31
Aug
2016
Observation of classical-quantum crossover of 1/f flux noise and its paramagnetic temperature dependence
By analyzing the dissipative dynamics of a tunable gap flux qubit, we extract both sides of its two-sided environmental flux noise spectral density over a range of frequencies around
2kBT/h≈1GHz, allowing for the observation of a classical-quantum crossover. Below the crossover point, the symmetric noise component follows a 1/f power law that matches the magnitude of the 1/f noise near 1Hz. The antisymmetric component displays a 1/T dependence below 100mK, providing dynamical evidence for a paramagnetic environment. Extrapolating the two-sided spectrum predicts the linewidth and reorganization energy of incoherent resonant tunneling between flux qubit wells.