Chris Axline

Measurement and Control of Quasiparticle Dynamics in a Superconducting Qubit

  1. Chen Wang,
  2. Yvonne Y. Gao,
  3. Ioan M. Pop,
  4. Uri Vool,
  5. Chris Axline,
  6. Teresa Brecht,
  7. Reinier W. Heeres,
  8. Luigi Frunzio,
  9. Michel H. Devoret,
  10. Gianluigi Catelani,
  11. Leonid I. Glazman,
  12. and Robert J. Schoelkopf
Superconducting circuits have attracted growing interest in recent years as a promising candidate for fault-tolerant quantum information processing. Extensive efforts have always been
taken to completely shield these circuits from external magnetic field to protect the integrity of superconductivity. Surprisingly, here we show vortices can dramatically improve the performance of superconducting qubits by reducing the lifetimes of detrimental single-electron-like excitations known as quasiparticles. Using a contactless injection technique with unprecedented dynamic range, we directly demonstrate the power-law decay characteristics of the canonical quasiparticle recombination process, and show quantization of quasiparticle trapping rate due to individual vortices. Each vortex in our aluminium film shows a quasiparticle „trapping power“ of 0.067±0.005 cm2/s, enough to dominate over the vanishingly weak recombination in a modern transmon qubit. These results highlight the prominent role of quasiparticle trapping in future development of quantum circuits, and provide a powerful characterization tool along the way.
arxiv pdf