Energy participation ratio analysis for very anharmonic superconducting circuits

  1. Figen Yilmaz,
  2. Siddharth Singh,
  3. Martijn F.S. Zwanenburg,
  4. Jinlun Hu,
  5. Taryn V. Stefanski,
  6. and Christian Kraglund Andersen
Superconducting circuits are being employed for large-scale quantum devices, and a pertinent challenge is to perform accurate numerical simulations of device parameters. One of the
most advanced methods for analyzing superconducting circuit designs is the energy participation ratio (EPR) method, which constructs quantum Hamiltonians based on the energy distribution extracted from classical electromagnetic simulations. In the EPR approach, we extract linear terms from finite element simulations and add nonlinear terms using the energy participation ratio extracted from the classical simulations. However, the EPR method relies on a low-order expansion of nonlinear terms, which is prohibitive for accurately describing highly anharmonic circuits. An example of such a circuit is the fluxonium qubit, which has recently attracted increasing attention due to its high lifetimes and low error rates. In this work, we extend the EPR approach to effectively address highly nonlinear superconducting circuits, and, as a proof of concept, we apply our approach to a fluxonium qubit. Specifically, we design, fabricate, and experimentally measure a fluxonium qubit coupled to a readout resonator. We compare the measured frequencies of both the qubit and the resonator to those extracted from the EPR analysis, and we find an excellent agreement. Furthermore, we compare the dispersive shift as a function of external flux obtained from experiments with our EPR analysis and a simpler lumped element model. Our findings reveal that the EPR results closely align with the experimental data, providing more accurate estimations compared to the simplified lumped element simulations.

Improved fluxonium readout through dynamic flux pulsing

  1. Taryn V. Stefanski,
  2. Figen Yilmaz,
  3. Eugene Y. Huang,
  4. Martijn F.S. Zwanenburg,
  5. Siddharth Singh,
  6. Siyu Wang,
  7. Lukas J. Splitthoff,
  8. and Christian Kraglund Andersen
The ability to perform rapid, high fidelity readout of a qubit state is an important requirement for quantum algorithms and, in particular, for enabling operations such as mid-circuit
measurements and measurement-based feedback for error correction schemes on large quantum processors. The growing interest in fluxonium qubits, due to their long coherence times and high anharmonicity, merits further attention to reducing the readout duration and measurement errors. We find that this can be accomplished by exploiting the flux tunability of fluxonium qubits. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate flux-pulse-assisted readout, as proposed in Phys. Rev. Applied 22, 014079 (this https URL), in a setup without a quantum-limited parametric amplifier. Increasing the dispersive shift magnitude by almost 20% through flux pulsing, we achieve an assignment fidelity of 94.3% with an integration time of 280 ns. The readout performance is limited by state initialization, but we find that the limit imposed only by the signal-to-noise ratio corresponds to an assignment fidelity of 99.9% with a 360 ns integration time. We also verify these results through simple semi-classical simulations. These results constitute the fastest reported readout of a fluxonium qubit, with the prospect of further improvement by incorporation of a parametric amplifier in the readout chain to enhance measurement efficiency.