Inherent flux crosstalk and coupler-driven single-qubit gates in superconducting circuits

  1. Balázs Gulácsi,
  2. and Guido Burkard
Crosstalk refers to unwanted qubit addressing. This is particularly detrimental when scaling up quantum information systems because unintended interactions limit their overall performance.
For superconducting qubits, tunable couplings and frequency tunability achieved through externally applied magnetic fluxes enable high-fidelity entangling gates; however, they also introduce crosstalk through unintended flux coupling. In this work, we investigate the impact of time-dependent external magnetic fluxes in quantized circuits on superconducting qubit couplings. We find that non-trivial cross-voltage driving emerges between capacitively linked qubits when the magnetic flux threading the SQUID loop of a qubit varies in time, in a manner analogous to Faraday’s law of induction. Crucially, we show that this effect enables fast single qubit control through the coupler element in standard tunable-coupler architectures, potentially eliminating the need for individual microwave XY control lines.

Smoking-gun signatures of non-Markovianity of a superconducting qubit

  1. Balázs Gulácsi,
  2. and Guido Burkard
We describe temporally correlated noise processes that influence the idle evolution of a superconducting transmon qubit. To model the composite qubit-environment system we use quantum
circuit theory, and we show how a circuit Hamiltonian can be derived for transverse noise affecting the qubit. Based on the time-convolutionless projection operator method, we construct a time-local master equation which, when transformed to its canonical Lindblad form, exhbitis a decay rate that is negative at all times, corresponding to eternally non-Markovian dynamics. By expressing the solution of the master equation in the Kraus representation, we identify two crucial non-Markovian phenomena: periodic revivals of coherence, and the appearance of additional frequencies far from the qubit frequency in the precession of the qubit state. When a single qubit gate acts on the qubit state, these extra frequency terms rotate undesirably and they effectively act as the memory of the state prior to the rotation around the Bloch sphere.