Catching Shaped Microwave Photons with 99.4% Absorption Efficiency

  1. J. Wenner,
  2. Yi Yin,
  3. Yu Chen,
  4. R. Barends,
  5. B. Chiaro,
  6. E. Jeffrey,
  7. J. Kelly,
  8. A. Megrant,
  9. J. Y. Mutus,
  10. C. Neill,
  11. P. J. J. O'Malley,
  12. P. Roushan,
  13. D. Sank,
  14. A. Vainsencher,
  15. T. C. White,
  16. Alexander N. Korotkov,
  17. A. N. Cleland,
  18. and John M. Martinis
Quantum information systems require high fidelity quantum operations. It is particularly challenging to convert flying qubits to stationary qubits for deterministic quantum networks, since absorbing naturally shaped emission has a maximum fidelity of only 54%. Theoretical protocols reaching 100% efficiency rely upon sculpting the time dependence of photon wavepackets and receiver coupling. Using these schemes, experimental fidelities have reached up to 20% for optical photons and 81% for microwave photons, although with drive pulses much longer than the cavity decay rate. Here, we demonstrate a particularly simple „time reversed“ photon shape and gated receiver with an absorption fidelity of 99.4% and a receiver efficiency of 97.4% for microwave photons. We classically drive a superconducting coplanar waveguide resonator an order of magnitude shorter than the intrinsic decay time. With the fidelity now at the error threshold for fault tolerant quantum communication (96%) and computation (99.4%) and comparable to fidelities of good logic gates and measurements, new designs may be envisioned for quantum communication and computation systems.
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