We fabricate and characterize superconducting through-silicon vias and electrodes suitable for superconducting quantum processors. We measure internal quality factors of a million fortest resonators excited at single-photon levels, when vias are used to stitch ground planes on the front and back sides of the wafer. This resonator performance is on par with the state of the art for silicon-based planar solutions, despite the presence of vias. Via stitching of ground planes is an important enabling technology for increasing the physical size of quantum processor chips, and is a first step toward more complex quantum devices with three-dimensional integration.
Radiation sensors based on the heating effect of the absorbed radiation are typically relatively simple to operate and flexible in terms of the input frequency. Consequently, they arewidely applied, for example, in gas detection, security, THz imaging, astrophysical observations, and medical applications. A new spectrum of important applications is currently emerging from quantum technology and especially from electrical circuits behaving quantum mechanically. This circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) has given rise to unprecedented single-photon detectors and a quantum computer supreme to the classical supercomputers in a certain task. Thermal sensors are appealing in enhancing these devices since they are not plagued by quantum noise and are smaller, simpler, and consume about six orders of magnitude less power than the commonly used traveling-wave parametric amplifiers. However, despite great progress in the speed and noise levels of thermal sensors, no bolometer to date has proven fast and sensitive enough to provide advantages in cQED. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a bolometer surpassing this threshold with a noise equivalent power of 30zW/Hz−−−√ on par with the current record while providing two-orders of magnitude shorter thermal time constant of 500 ns. Importantly, both of these characteristic numbers have been measured directly from the same device, which implies a faithful estimation of the calorimetric energy resolution of a single 30-GHz photon. These improvements stem from the utilization of a graphene monolayer as the active material with extremely low specific heat. The minimum demonstrated time constant of 200 ns falls greatly below the state-of-the-art dephasing times of roughly 100 {\mu}s for superconducting qubits and meets the timescales of contemporary readout schemes thus enabling the utilization of thermal detectors in cQED.
A localized qubit entangled with a propagating quantum field is well suited
to study non-local aspects of quantum mechanics and may also provide a channel
to communicate between spatiallyseparated nodes in a quantum network. Here, we
report the on demand generation and characterization of Bell-type entangled
states between a superconducting qubit and propagating microwave fields
composed of zero, one and two-photon Fock states. Using low noise linear
amplification and efficient data acquisition we extract all relevant
correlations between the qubit and the photon states and demonstrate
entanglement with high fidelity.