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
02
Mä
2023
A high-fidelity microwave beamsplitter with a parity-protected converter
Fast, high-fidelity operations between microwave resonators are an important tool for bosonic quantum computation and simulation with superconducting circuits. An attractive approach
for implementing these operations is to couple these resonators via a nonlinear converter and actuate parametric processes with RF drives. It can be challenging to make these processes simultaneously fast and high fidelity, since this requires introducing strong drives without activating parasitic processes or introducing additional decoherence channels. We show that in addition to a careful management of drive frequencies and the spectrum of environmental noise, leveraging the inbuilt symmetries of the converter Hamiltonian can suppress unwanted nonlinear interactions, preventing converter-induced decoherence. We demonstrate these principles using a differentially-driven DC-SQUID as our converter, coupled to two high-Q microwave cavities. Using this architecture, we engineer a highly-coherent beamsplitter and fast (∼ 100 ns) swaps between the cavities, limited primarily by their intrinsic single-photon loss. We characterize this beamsplitter in the cavities‘ joint single-photon subspace, and show that we can detect and post-select photon loss events to achieve a beamsplitter gate fidelity exceeding 99.98%, which to our knowledge far surpasses the current state of the art.
Thermal resistance in superconducting flip-chip assemblies
Cryogenic microsystems that utilize different 3D integration techniques are being actively developed, e.g., for the needs of quantum technologies. 3D integration can introduce opportunities
and challenges to the thermal management of low temperature devices. In this work, we investigate sub-1 K inter-chip thermal resistance of a flip-chip bonded assembly, where two silicon chips are interconnected by indium bumps by atmospheric thermocompression bonding. The temperature dependence of the inter-chip thermal resistance follows the power law of αT−3, with α=7.7−15.4 K4 μm2/nW and a thermal contact area of 0.306 mm2. The T−3 relation indicates phononic interfacial thermal resistance, which is supported by the vanishing electrical thermal conduction due to the superconducting interconnections. Such a thermal resistance value can introduce a thermalization bottleneck, which can be detrimental for some applications, but it can also be harnessed. We provide a study of the latter case by simulating the performance of solid-state junction microrefrigerator where we use the measured thermal resistance value.
Random telegraph fluctuations in granular microwave resonators
Microwave circuit electrodynamics of disordered superconductors is a very active research topic spawning a wide range of experiments and applications. For compact superconducting circuit
elements, the transition to an insulating state poses a limit to the maximum attainable kinetic inductance. It is therefore vital to study the fundamental noise properties of thin films close to this transition, particularly in situations where a good coherence and temporal stability is required. In this paper, we present measurements on superconducting granular aluminum microwave resonators with high normal state resistances, where the influence of the superconductor to insulator phase transition is visible. We trace fluctuations of the fundamental resonance frequency and observe, in addition to a 1/f noise pattern, a distinct excess noise, reminiscent of a random telegraph signal. The excess noise shows a strong dependency on the resistivity of the films as well as the sample temperature, but not on the applied microwave power.
Flip-Chip Packaging of Fluxonium Qubits
The strong anharmonicity and high coherence times inherent to fluxonium superconducting circuits are beneficial for implementing quantum information processors. In addition to requiring
high-quality physical qubits, a quantum processor needs to be assembled in a manner that reduces crosstalk and decoherence. In this letter, we report work on fluxonium qubits packaged in a flip-chip architecture. Here, the fluxonium qubits are embedded in a multi-chip module (MCM), where a classical control and readout chip is bump-bonded to the quantum chip. The modular approach allows for improved connectivity between qubits and control/readout elements, and separate fabrication processes. We demonstrate that this configuration does not degrade the fluxonium qubit performance, and identify the main decoherence mechanisms to improve on the reported results.
01
Mä
2023
Parametric Amplifier Matching Using Legendre Prototypes
In this note we describe Josephson parametric amplifier (JPA) matching networks based on Legendre polynomials. These networks typically exhibit lower ripple and gentler roll-off than
Chebyshev networks with similar parameters, and can be viewed as bridging the gap between Butterworth and Chebyshev ones. We tabulate prototype coefficients for parametric amplifiers based on Legendre polynomials with a range of gain and ripple parameters, and for a range of network orders. We also use this opportunity to further illustrate the synthesis of these networks based on methods from previous work, and synthesize a prototype JPA with 20dB gain at a center frequency of 5GHz with a bandwidth of 500MHz.
Hardware implementation of quantum stabilizers in superconducting circuits
Stabilizer operations are at the heart of quantum error correction and are typically implemented in software-controlled entangling gates and measurements of groups of qubits. Alternatively,
qubits can be designed so that the Hamiltonian corresponds directly to a stabilizer for protecting quantum information. We demonstrate such a hardware implementation of stabilizers in a superconducting circuit composed of chains of π-periodic Josephson elements. With local on-chip flux- and charge-biasing, we observe a softening of the energy band dispersion with respect to flux that is exponential in the number of frustrated plaquette elements, in close agreement with our numerical modeling.
28
Feb
2023
Near-field localization of the boson peak on tantalum films for superconducting quantum devices
Superconducting circuits are among the most advanced quantum computing technologies, however their performance is currently limited by losses found in surface oxides and disordered
materials. Here, we identify and spatially localize a near-field signature of loss centers on tantalum films using terahertz scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscopy (s-SNOM). Making use of terahertz nanospectroscopy, we observe a localized excess vibrational mode around 0.5 THz and identify this resonance as the boson peak, a signature of amorphous materials. Grazing-incidence wide-angle x-ray scattering (GIWAXS) shows that oxides on freshly solvent-cleaned samples are amorphous, whereas crystalline phases emerge after aging in air. By localizing defect centers at the nanoscale, our characterization techniques and results will inform the optimization of fabrication procedures for new low-loss superconducting circuits.
Two qubits in one transmon — QEC without ancilla hardware
We show that it is theoretically possible to use higher energy levels for storing and controlling two qubits within a superconducting transmon. This is done by identifying energy levels
as product states between multiple effecitve qubits. As a proof of concept we realise a complete set of gates necessary for universal computing by numerically optimising control pulses for single qubit gates on each of the qubits, entangling gates between the two qubits in one transmon, and an entangling gate between two qubits from two coupled transmons. The optimisation considers parameters which could make it possible to validate this experimentally. With these control pulses it is in principle possible to double the number of available qubits without any overhead in hardware. The additional qubits could be used in algorithms which need many short-living qubits such as syndrom qubits in error correction or by embedding effecitve higher connectivity in qubit networks.
Modeling low- and high-frequency noise in transmon qubits with resource-efficient measurement
Transmon qubits experience open system effects that manifest as noise at a broad range of frequencies. We present a model of these effects using the Redfield master equation with a
hybrid bath consisting of low and high-frequency components. We use two-level fluctuators to simulate 1/f-like noise behavior, which is a dominant source of decoherence for superconducting qubits. By measuring quantum state fidelity under free evolution with and without dynamical decoupling (DD), we can fit the low- and high-frequency noise parameters in our model. We train and test our model using experiments on quantum devices available through IBM quantum experience. Our model accurately predicts the fidelity decay of random initial states, including the effect of DD pulse sequences. We compare our model with two simpler models and confirm the importance of including both high-frequency and 1/f noise in order to accurately predict transmon behavior.
27
Feb
2023
High-kinetic inductance NbN films for high-quality compact superconducting resonators
Niobium nitride (NbN) is a particularly promising material for quantum technology applications, as entails the degree of reproducibility necessary for large-scale of superconducting
circuits. We demonstrate that resonators based on NbN thin films present a one-photon internal quality factor above 105 maintaining a high impedance (larger than 2kΩ), with a footprint of approximately 50×100 μm2 and a self-Kerr nonlinearity of few tenths of Hz. These quality factors, mostly limited by losses induced by the coupling to two-level systems, have been maintained for kinetic inductances ranging from tenths to hundreds of pH/square. We also demonstrate minimal variations in the performance of the resonators during multiple cooldowns over more than nine months. Our work proves the versatility of niobium nitride high-kinetic inductance resonators, opening perspectives towards the fabrication of compact, high-impedance and high-quality multimode circuits, with sizable interactions.