As quantum information technologies advance they face challenges in scaling and connectivity. In particular, two necessities remain independent of the technological implementation:the need for connectivity between distant qubits and the need for efficient generation of entanglement. Perfect State Transfer is a technique which realises the time optimal transfer of a quantum state between distant nodes of qubit lattices with only nearest-neighbour couplings, hence providing an important tool to improve device connectivity. Crucially, the transfer protocol results in effective parity-dependent non-local interactions, extending its utility to the efficient generation of entangled states. Here, we experimentally demonstrate Perfect State Transfer and the generation of multi-qubit entanglement on a chain of superconducting qubits. The system consists of six fixed-frequency transmon qubits connected by tunable couplers, where the couplings are controlled via parametric drives. By simultaneously activating all couplings and engineering their individual amplitudes and frequencies, we implement Perfect State Transfer on up to six qubits and observe the respective single-excitation dynamics for different initial states. We then apply the protocol in the presence of multiple excitations and verify its parity-dependent property, where the number of excitations within the chain controls the phase of the transferred state. Finally, we utilise this property to prepare a multi-qubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state using only a single transfer operation, demonstrating its application for efficient entanglement generation.
Quantum information is typically encoded in the state of a qubit that is decoupled from the environment. In contrast, waveguide quantum electrodynamics studies qubits coupled to a modecontinuum, exposing them to a loss channel and causing quantum information to be lost before coherent operations can be performed. Here we restore coherence by realizing a dark state that exploits symmetry properties and interactions between four qubits. Dark states decouple from the waveguide and are thus a valuable resource for quantum information but also come with a challenge: they cannot be controlled by the waveguide drive. We overcome this problem by designing a drive that utilizes the symmetry properties of the collective state manifold allowing us to selectively drive both bright and dark states. The decay time of the dark state exceeds that of the waveguide-limited single qubit by more than two orders of magnitude. Spectroscopy on the second excitation manifold provides further insight into the level structure of the hybridized system. Our experiment paves the way for implementations of quantum many-body physics in waveguides and the realization of quantum information protocols using decoherence-free subspaces.
Superconducting qubits are a leading platform for scalable quantum computing and quantum error correction. One feature of this platform is the ability to perform projective measurementsorders of magnitude more quickly than qubit decoherence times. Such measurements are enabled by the use of quantum-limited parametric amplifiers in conjunction with ferrite circulators – magnetic devices which provide isolation from noise and decoherence due to amplifier backaction. Because these non-reciprocal elements have limited performance and are not easily integrated on-chip, it has been a longstanding goal to replace them with a scalable alternative. Here, we demonstrate a solution to this problem by using a superconducting switch to control the coupling between a qubit and amplifier. Doing so, we measure a transmon qubit using a single, chip-scale device to provide both parametric amplification and isolation from the bulk of amplifier backaction. This measurement is also fast, high fidelity, and has 70% efficiency, comparable to the best that has been reported in any superconducting qubit measurement. As such, this work constitutes a high-quality platform for the scalable measurement of superconducting qubits.