Fast Unconditional Reset and Leakage Reduction of a Tunable Superconducting Qubit via an Engineered Dissipative Bath

Rapid and accurate initialization of qubits, reset, is a crucial building block for various tasks in quantum information processing, such as quantum error-correction and estimation of statistics of noisy quantum devices with many qubits. We demonstrate unconditional reset of a frequency-tunable transmon qubit that simultaneously resets multiple excited states by utilizing a metamaterial waveguide engineered to provide a cold bath over a wide spectral range, while providing strong protection against Purcell decay of the qubit. We report reset error below 0.13% (0.16%) when prepared in the first (second) excited state of the transmon within 88ns. Additionally, through the sharp roll-off in the density of states of the metamaterial waveguide, we implement a leakage reduction unit that selectively resets the transmon’s second excited state to 0.285(3)% residual population within 44ns while acting trivially in the computational subspace as an identity operation that preserves encoded information with an infidelity of 0.72(1)%.