I. Tsioutsios

Real-time quantum error correction beyond break-even

  1. V. V. Sivak,
  2. A. Eickbusch,
  3. B. Royer,
  4. S. Singh,
  5. I. Tsioutsios,
  6. S. Ganjam,
  7. A. Miano,
  8. B. L. Brock,
  9. A. Z. Ding,
  10. L. Frunzio,
  11. S. M. Girvin,
  12. R. J. Schoelkopf,
  13. and M. H. Devoret
The ambition of harnessing the quantum for computation is at odds with the fundamental phenomenon of decoherence. The purpose of quantum error correction (QEC) is to counteract the
natural tendency of a complex system to decohere. This cooperative process, which requires participation of multiple quantum and classical components, creates a special type of dissipation that removes the entropy caused by the errors faster than the rate at which these errors corrupt the stored quantum information. Previous experimental attempts to engineer such a process faced an excessive generation of errors that overwhelmed the error-correcting capability of the process itself. Whether it is practically possible to utilize QEC for extending quantum coherence thus remains an open question. We answer it by demonstrating a fully stabilized and error-corrected logical qubit whose quantum coherence is significantly longer than that of all the imperfect quantum components involved in the QEC process, beating the best of them with a coherence gain of G=2.27±0.07. We achieve this performance by combining innovations in several domains including the fabrication of superconducting quantum circuits and model-free reinforcement learning.
arxiv pdf

Free-standing silicon shadow masks for transmon qubit fabrication

  1. I. Tsioutsios,
  2. K. Serniak,
  3. S. Diamond,
  4. Z. Wang,
  5. S. Shankar,
  6. L. Frunzio,
  7. R. J. Schoelkopf,
  8. and M. H. Devoret
Nanofabrication techniques for superconducting qubits rely on resist-based masks patterned by electron-beam or optical lithography. We have developed an alternative nanofabrication
technique based on free-standing silicon shadow masks fabricated from silicon-on-insulator wafers. These silicon shadow masks not only eliminate organic residues associated with resist-based lithography, but also provide a pathway to better understand and control surface-dielectric losses in superconducting qubits by decoupling mask fabrication from substrate preparation. We have successfully fabricated aluminum 3D transmon superconducting qubits with these shadow masks, and demonstrated energy relaxation times on par with state-of-the-art values.
arxiv pdf