Qubit readouts enabled by qubit cloaking

  1. Manuel H. Muñoz-Arias,
  2. Cristóbal Lledó,
  3. and Alexandre Blais
Time-dependent drives play a crucial role in quantum computing efforts with circuit quantum electrodynamics. They enable single-qubit control, entangling logical operations, as well
as qubit readout. However, their presence can lead to deleterious effects such as large ac-Stark shifts and unwanted qubit transitions ultimately reflected into reduced control or readout fidelities. Qubit cloaking was introduced in Lledó, Dassonneville, et al. [arXiv:2022.05758] to temporarily decouple the qubit from the coherent photon population of a driven cavity, allowing for the application of arbitrary displacements to the cavity field while avoiding the deleterious effects on the qubit. For qubit readout, cloaking permits to prearm the cavity with an, in principle, arbitrarily large number of photons, in anticipation to the qubit-state-dependent evolution of the cavity field, allowing for improved readout strategies. Here we take a closer look at two of them. First, arm-and-release readout, introduced together with qubit cloaking, where after arming the cavity the cloaking mechanism is released and the cavity field evolves under the application of a constant drive amplitude. Second, an arm-and-longitudinal readout scheme, where the cavity drive amplitude is slowly modulated after the release. We show that the two schemes complement each other, offering an improvement over the standard dispersive readout for any values of the dispersive interaction and cavity decay rate, as well as any target measurement integration time. Our results provide a recommendation for improving qubit readout without changes to the standard circuit QED architecture.

Cloaking a qubit in a cavity

  1. Cristóbal Lledó,
  2. Rémy Dassonneville,
  3. Adrien Moulinas,
  4. Joachim Cohen,
  5. Ross Shillito,
  6. Audrey Bienfait,
  7. Benjamin Huard,
  8. and Alexandre Blais
Cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) uses a cavity to engineer the mode structure of the vacuum electromagnetic field such as to enhance the interaction between light and matter. Exploiting
these ideas in solid-state systems has lead to circuit QED which has emerged as a valuable tool to explore the rich physics of quantum optics and as a platform for quantum computation. Here we introduce a simple approach to further engineer the light-matter interaction in a driven cavity by controllably decoupling a qubit from the cavity’s photon population, effectively cloaking the qubit from the cavity. This is realized by driving the qubit with an external tone tailored to destructively interfere with the cavity field, leaving the qubit to interact with a cavity which appears to be in the vacuum state. Our experiment demonstrates how qubit cloaking can be exploited to cancel ac-Stark shift and measurement-induced dephasing, and to accelerate qubit readout.

Nonreciprocal devices based on voltage-tunable junctions

  1. Catherine Leroux,
  2. Adrian Parra-Rodriguez,
  3. Ross Shillito,
  4. Agustin Di Paolo,
  5. William D. Oliver,
  6. Charles M. Marcus,
  7. Morten Kjaergaard,
  8. András Gyenis,
  9. and Alexandre Blais
We propose to couple the flux degree of freedom of one mode with the charge degree of freedom of a second mode in a hybrid superconducting-semiconducting architecture. Nonreciprocity
can arise in this architecture in the presence of external static magnetic fields alone. We leverage this property to engineer a passive on-chip gyrator, the fundamental two-port nonreciprocal device which can be used to build other nonreciprocal devices such as circulators. We analytically and numerically investigate how the nonlinearity of the interaction, circuit disorder and parasitic couplings affect the scattering response of the gyrator.

Extensible circuit-QED architecture via amplitude- and frequency-variable microwaves

  1. Agustin Di Paolo,
  2. Catherine Leroux,
  3. Thomas M. Hazard,
  4. Kyle Serniak,
  5. Simon Gustavsson,
  6. Alexandre Blais,
  7. and William D. Oliver
We introduce a circuit-QED architecture combining fixed-frequency qubits and microwave-driven couplers. In the appropriate frame, the drive parameters appear as tunable knobs enabling
selective two-qubit coupling and coherent-error suppression. We moreover introduce a set of controlled-phase gates based on drive-amplitude and drive-frequency modulation. We develop a theoretical framework based on Floquet theory to model microwave-activated interactions with time-dependent drive parameters, which we also use for pulse shaping. We perform numerical simulations of the gate fidelity for realistic circuit parameters, and discuss the impact of drive-induced decoherence. We estimate average gate fidelities beyond 99.9% for all-microwave controlled-phase operations with gate times in the range 50−120ns. These two-qubit gates can operate over a large drive-frequency bandwidth and in a broad range of circuit parameters, thereby improving extensibility. We address the frequency allocation problem for this architecture using perturbation theory, demonstrating that qubit, coupler and drive frequencies can be chosen such that undesired static and driven interactions remain bounded in a multi-qubit device. Our numerical methods are useful for describing the time-evolution of driven systems in the adiabatic limit, and are applicable to a wide variety of circuit-QED setups.

Dynamics of Transmon Ionization

  1. Ross Shillito,
  2. Alexandru Petrescu,
  3. Joachim Cohen,
  4. Jackson Beall,
  5. Markus Hauru,
  6. Martin Ganahl,
  7. Adam G.M. Lewis,
  8. Guifre Vidal,
  9. and Alexandre Blais
Qubit measurement and control in circuit QED rely on microwave drives, with higher drive amplitudes ideally leading to faster processes. However, degradation in qubit coherence time
and readout fidelity has been observed even under moderate drive amplitudes corresponding to few photons populating the measurement resonator. Here, we numerically explore the dynamics of a driven transmon-resonator system under strong and nearly resonant measurement drives, and find clear signatures of transmon ionization where the qubit escapes out of its cosine potential. Using a semiclassical model, we interpret this ionization as resulting from resonances occurring at specific resonator photon populations. We find that the photon populations at which these spurious transitions occur are strongly parameter dependent and that they can occur at low resonator photon population, something which may explain the experimentally observed degradation in measurement fidelity.

Realizing Repeated Quantum Error Correction in a Distance-Three Surface Code

  1. Sebastian Krinner,
  2. Nathan Lacroix,
  3. Ants Remm,
  4. Agustin Di Paolo,
  5. Elie Genois,
  6. Catherine Leroux,
  7. Christoph Hellings,
  8. Stefania Lazar,
  9. Francois Swiadek,
  10. Johannes Herrmann,
  11. Graham J. Norris,
  12. Christian Kraglund Andersen,
  13. Markus Müller,
  14. Alexandre Blais,
  15. Christopher Eichler,
  16. and Andreas Wallraff
Quantum computers hold the promise of solving computational problems which are intractable using conventional methods. For fault-tolerant operation quantum computers must correct errors
occurring due to unavoidable decoherence and limited control accuracy. Here, we demonstrate quantum error correction using the surface code, which is known for its exceptionally high tolerance to errors. Using 17 physical qubits in a superconducting circuit we encode quantum information in a distance-three logical qubit building up on recent distance-two error detection experiments. In an error correction cycle taking only 1.1μs, we demonstrate the preservation of four cardinal states of the logical qubit. Repeatedly executing the cycle, we measure and decode both bit- and phase-flip error syndromes using a minimum-weight perfect-matching algorithm in an error-model-free approach and apply corrections in postprocessing. We find a low error probability of 3% per cycle when rejecting experimental runs in which leakage is detected. The measured characteristics of our device agree well with a numerical model. Our demonstration of repeated, fast and high-performance quantum error correction cycles, together with recent advances in ion traps, support our understanding that fault-tolerant quantum computation will be practically realizable.

Engineering, control and longitudinal readout of Floquet qubits

  1. Anthony Gandon,
  2. Camille Le Calonnec,
  3. Ross Shillito,
  4. Alexandru Petrescu,
  5. and Alexandre Blais
Properties of time-periodic Hamiltonians can be exploited to increase the dephasing time of qubits and to design protected one and two-qubit gates. Recently, Huang et al. [Phys. Rev.
Applied 15, 034065 (2021)] have shown that time-dependent Floquet states offer a manifold of working points with dynamical protection larger than the few usual static sweet spots. Here, we use the framework of many-mode Floquet theory to describe approaches to robustly control Floquet qubits in the presence of multiple drive tones. Following the same approach, we introduce a longitudinal readout protocol to measure the Floquet qubit without the need of first adiabatically mapping back the Floquet states to the static qubit states, which results in a significant speedup in the measurement time of the Floquet qubit. The analytical approach developed here can be applied to any Hamiltonian involving a small number of distinct drive tones, typically the study of standard parametric gates for qubits outside of the rotating-wave approximation.

Superconducting coupler with exponentially large on-off ratio

  1. Catherine Leroux,
  2. Agustin Di Paolo,
  3. and Alexandre Blais
Tunable two-qubit couplers offer an avenue to mitigate errors in multiqubit superconducting quantum processors. However, most couplers operate in a narrow frequency band and target
specific couplings, such as the spurious ZZ interaction. We introduce a superconducting coupler that alleviates these limitations by suppressing all two-qubit interactions with an exponentially large on-off ratio and without the need for fine-tuning. Our approach is based on a bus mode supplemented by an ancillary nonlinear resonator mode. Driving the ancillary mode leads to a coupler-state-dependent field displacement in the resonator which, in turn, results in an exponential suppression of real and virtual two-qubit interactions with respect to the drive power. A superconducting circuit implementation supporting the proposed mechanism is presented.

Accurate methods for the analysis of strong-drive effects in parametric gates

  1. Alexandru Petrescu,
  2. Camille Le Calonnec,
  3. Catherine Leroux,
  4. Agustin Di Paolo,
  5. Pranav Mundada,
  6. Sara Sussman,
  7. Andrei Vrajitoarea,
  8. Andrew A. Houck,
  9. and Alexandre Blais
The ability to perform fast, high-fidelity entangling gates is an important requirement for a viable quantum processor. In practice, achieving fast gates often comes with the penalty
of strong-drive effects that are not captured by the rotating-wave approximation. These effects can be analyzed in simulations of the gate protocol, but those are computationally costly and often hide the physics at play. Here, we show how to efficiently extract gate parameters by directly solving a Floquet eigenproblem using exact numerics and a perturbative analytical approach. As an example application of this toolkit, we study the space of parametric gates generated between two fixed-frequency transmon qubits connected by a parametrically driven coupler. Our analytical treatment, based on time-dependent Schrieffer-Wolff perturbation theory, yields closed-form expressions for gate frequencies and spurious interactions, and is valid for strong drives. From these calculations, we identify optimal regimes of operation for different types of gates including iSWAP, controlled-Z, and CNOT. These analytical results are supplemented by numerical Floquet computations from which we directly extract drive-dependent gate parameters. This approach has a considerable computational advantage over full simulations of time evolutions. More generally, our combined analytical and numerical strategy allows us to characterize two-qubit gates involving parametrically driven interactions, and can be applied to gate optimization and cross-talk mitigation such as the cancellation of unwanted ZZ interactions in multi-qubit architectures.

Moving beyond the transmon: Noise-protected superconducting quantum circuits

  1. András Gyenis,
  2. Agustin Di Paolo,
  3. Jens Koch,
  4. Alexandre Blais,
  5. Andrew A. Houck,
  6. and David I. Schuster
Artificial atoms realized by superconducting circuits offer unique opportunities to store and process quantum information with high fidelity. Among them, implementations of circuits
that harness intrinsic noise protection have been rapidly developed in recent years. These noise-protected devices constitute a new class of qubits in which the computational states are largely decoupled from local noise channels. The main challenges in engineering such systems are simultaneously guarding against both bit- and phase-flip errors, and also ensuring high-fidelity qubit control. Although partial noise protection is possible in superconducting circuits relying on a single quantum degree of freedom, the promise of complete protection can only be fulfilled by implementing multimode or hybrid circuits. This Perspective reviews the theoretical principles at the heart of these new qubits, describes recent experiments, and highlights the potential of robust encoding of quantum information in superconducting qubits.