Direct evidence for cosmic-ray-induced correlated errors in superconducting qubit array

Correlated errors can significantly impact the quantum error correction, which challenges the assumption that errors occur in different qubits independently in both space and time. Superconducting qubits have been found to suffer correlated errors across multiple qubits, which could be attributable to ionizing radiations and cosmic rays. Nevertheless, the direct evidence and a quantitative understanding of this relationship are currently lacking. In this work, we propose to continuously monitor multi-qubit simultaneous charge-parity jumps to detect correlated errors and find that occur more frequently than multi-qubit simultaneous bit flips. Then, we propose to position two cosmic-ray muon detectors directly beneath the sample box in a dilution refrigerator and successfully observe the correlated errors in a superconducting qubit array triggered by muons. By introducing a lead shielding layer on the refrigerator, we also reveal that the majority of other correlated errors are primarily induced by gamma rays. Furthermore, we find the superconducting film with a higher recombination rate of quasiparticles used in the qubits is helpful in reducing the duration of correlated errors. Our results provide experimental evidence of the impact of gamma rays and muons on superconducting quantum computation and offer practical insights into mitigation strategies for quantum error correction. In addition, we observe the average occurrence rate of muon-induced correlated errors in our processor is approximately 0.40 min−1cm−2, which is comparable to the muon event rate detected by the muon detector with 0.506 min−1cm−2. This demonstrates the potential applications of superconducting qubit arrays as low-energy threshold sensors in the field of high-energy physics.