One of the largest obstacles to building a quantum computer is gate error, where the physical evolution of the state of a qubit or group of qubits during a gate operation does not matchthe intended unitary transformation. Gate error stems from a combination of control errors and random single qubit errors from interaction with the environment. While great strides have been made in mitigating control errors, intrinsic qubit error remains a serious problem that sets the primary limit for gate fidelity in modern superconducting qubit architectures. Simultaneously, recent developments of small error-corrected logical qubit devices promise significant increases in logical state lifetime, but translating those improvements into increases in gate fidelity is a complex challenge. In this Letter, we propose a new formalism for implementing gates on and between small logical qubit devices which inherit the parent device’s tolerance to single qubit errors which occur at any time before or during the gate. Using a standard phenomenological noise model for superconducting qubits, we demonstrate a universal one- and two-qubit gate set with error rates an order of magnitude lower than those for equivalent operations on single qubits or pairs of qubits, running for the same total duration. The effective logical gate error rate in these models displays superlinear error reduction with linear increases in single qubit lifetime, proving that passive error correction is capable of increasing gate fidelity. These developments further suggest that incorporating small logical qubits into a measurement based code could substantially improve code performance.
By coupling pairs of superconducting qubits through a small Josephson junction with a time-dependent flux bias, we show that arbitrary interactions involving any combination of Paulimatrices can be generated with a small number of drive tones applied through the flux bias of the coupling junction. We then demonstrate that similar (though not fully universal) results can be achieved in capacitively coupled qubits by exploiting the higher energy states of the devices through multi-photon drive signals applied to the qubits‘ flux degrees of freedom. By using this mechanism to couple a qubit to a detuned resonator, the qubit’s rotating frame state can be non-destructively measured along any direction on the Bloch sphere. Finally, we describe how the frequency-converting nature of the couplings can be used to engineer a mechanism analogous to dynamic nuclear polarization in NMR systems, capable of cooling an array of qubits well below the ambient temperature, and outline how higher order interactions, such as local 3-body terms, can be engineered through the same couplings. Our results demonstrate that a programmable quantum simulator for large classes of interacting spin models could be engineered with the same physical hardware.
A physical realization of self correcting quantum code would be profoundly useful for constructing a quantum computer. In this theoretical work, we provide a partial solution to majorchallenges preventing self correcting quantum code from being engineered in realistic devices. We consider a variant of Kitaev’s toric code coupled to propagating bosons, which induce a long-ranged interaction between anyonic defects. By coupling the primary quantum system to an engineered dissipation source through resonant energy transfer, we demonstrate a „rate barrier“ which leads to a potentially enormous increase in the system’s quantum state lifetime through purely passive quantum error correction, even when coupled to an infinite temperature bath. While our mechanism is not scalable to infinitely large systems, the maximum effective size can be very large, and it is fully compatible with active error correction schemes. Our model uses only on-site and nearest-neighbor interactions, and could be implemented in superconducting qubits. We sketch one such implementation at the end of this work.