Microwave drives applied to superconducting qubits (SCQs) are central to high-fidelity control and fast readout. However, recent studies find that even drives far below the superconductinggap frequency may cause drive-induced quasiparticle generation (QPG) across Josephson junctions (JJs), posing a serious concern for fault-tolerant superconducting quantum computing. Here, we find experimental evidence that the actual QPG rates in strongly driven SCQs are remarkably lower than expected. We apply intense drive fields through readout resonators, reaching effective qubit drive amplitudes up to 300 GHz. The nonlinear response of the resonators enables quantification of the energy loss from SCQs into their environments, including the contribution from QPG. Even when conservatively attributing all measured dissipation to QPG, the observed energy dissipation rates are far lower than expected from the ideal QPG model. Meanwhile, calculations incorporating high-frequency cutoffs (HFCs) near 17-20 GHz in the QPG conductance can explain the experiments. These HFCs yield QPG rates a few orders of magnitude smaller than those without HFCs, providing evidence that the QPG rates are lower than predicted by the ideal model. Our findings prevent overestimation of drive-induced QPG and provide crucial guidance for operating superconducting quantum processors. Identifying the microscopic origin of the discrepancy opens new material and device opportunities to further mitigate QPG.
The ideal superconductor provides a pristine environment for the delicate states of a quantum computer: because there is an energy gap to excitations, there are no spurious modes withwhich the qubits can interact, causing irreversible decay of the quantum state. As a practical matter, however, there exists a high density of excitations out of the superconducting ground state even at ultralow temperature; these are known as quasiparticles. Observed quasiparticle densities are of order 1~μm−3, tens of orders of magnitude larger than the equilibrium density expected from theory. Nonequilibrium quasiparticles extract energy from the qubit mode and induce discrete changes in qubit offset charge, a potential source of dephasing. Here we show that a dominant mechanism for quasiparticle poisoning in superconducting qubits is direct absorption of high-energy photons at the qubit junction. We use a Josephson junction-based photon source to controllably dose qubit circuits with millimeter-wave radiation, and we use an interferometric quantum gate sequence to reconstruct the charge parity on the qubit island. We find that the structure of the qubit itself acts as a resonant antenna for millimeter-wave radiation, providing an efficient path for photons to generate quasiparticle excitations. A deep understanding of this physics will pave the way to realization of next-generation superconducting qubits that are robust against quasiparticle poisoning and could enable a new class of quantum sensors for dark matter detection.
Mitigating crosstalk errors, whether classical or quantum mechanical, is critically important for achieving high-fidelity entangling gates in multi-qubit circuits. For weakly anharmonicsuperconducting qubits, unwanted ZZ interactions can be suppressed by combining qubits with opposite anharmonicity. We present experimental measurements and theoretical modeling of two-qubit gate error for gates based on the cross resonance interaction between a capacitively shunted flux qubit and a transmon and demonstrate the elimination of the ZZ interaction.
High-fidelity gate operations are essential to the realization of a fault-tolerant quantum computer. In addition, the physical resources required to implement gates must scale efficientlywith system size. A longstanding goal of the superconducting qubit community is the tight integration of a superconducting quantum circuit with a proximal classical cryogenic control system. Here we implement coherent control of a superconducting transmon qubit using a Single Flux Quantum (SFQ) pulse driver cofabricated on the qubit chip. The pulse driver delivers trains of quantized flux pulses to the qubit through a weak capacitive coupling; coherent rotations of the qubit state are realized when the pulse-to-pulse timing is matched to a multiple of the qubit oscillation period. We measure the fidelity of SFQ-based gates to be ~95% using interleaved randomized benchmarking. Gate fidelities are limited by quasiparticle generation in the dissipative SFQ driver. We characterize the dissipative and dispersive contributions of the quasiparticle admittance and discuss mitigation strategies to suppress quasiparticle poisoning. These results open the door to integration of large-scale superconducting qubit arrays with SFQ control elements for low-latency feedback and stabilization.
We present a new type of transmon split-junction qubit which can be tuned by Meissner screening currents in the adjacent superconducting film electrodes. The best detected relaxationtime was of the order of 50 {\mu}s and the dephasing time about 70 {\mu}s. The achieved period of oscillation with magnetic field was much smaller than in usual SQUID-based transmon qubits, thus a strong effective field amplification has been realized. This Meissner qubit allows an efficient coupling to superconducting vortices. We present a quantitative analysis of the radiation-free energy relaxation in qubits coupled to Abrikosov vortices. The observation of coherent quantum oscillations provides strong evidence that vortices can exist in coherent quantum superpositions of different position states. According to our suggested model, the wave function collapse is defined by Caldeira-Leggett dissipation associated with viscous motion of the vortex cores.