Superconducting qubits show great promise for the realization of fault-tolerant quantum computing, but lossy, amorphous dielectrics limit current technology. Identifying highly crystallineand stoichiometric dielectrics with intrinsically low microwave loss is therefore a central materials challenge, yet experimentally validated platforms remain scarce. In this work, we integrate a crystalline dielectric into a heteroepitaxial TiN/γ-Al2O3/TiN trilayer grown via pulsed laser deposition. Correlative high-resolution imaging, diffraction, and spectroscopy measurements confirm the single-crystal quality and chemical integrity of all layers, with minimal defects and limited anion interdiffusion across the oxide-nitride interfaces. Using microwave lumped-element resonators with parallel-plate capacitors, we report the first direct measurement of the dielectric loss of epitaxial γ-Al2O3, for which we find a low intrinsic two-level system loss, δ0TLS=(2.8±0.1)×10−5. These results establish heteroepitaxial oxides on transition metal nitrides as an attractive materials platform for superconducting quantum circuits, particularly for integration into compact device architectures such as merged-element transmons and microwave kinetic inductance detectors.
Time-dependent electromagnetic drives are fundamental for controlling complex quantum systems, including superconducting Josephson circuits. In these devices, accurate time-dependentHamiltonian models are imperative for predicting their dynamics and designing high-fidelity quantum operations. Existing numerical methods, such as black-box quantization (BBQ) and energy-participation ratio (EPR), excel at modeling the static Hamiltonians of Josephson circuits. However, these techniques do not fully capture the behavior of driven circuits stimulated by external microwave drives, nor do they include a generalized approach to account for the inevitable noise and dissipation that enter through microwave ports. Here, we introduce novel numerical techniques that leverage classical microwave simulations that can be efficiently executed in finite element solvers, to obtain the time-dependent Hamiltonian of a microwave-driven superconducting circuit with arbitrary geometries. Importantly, our techniques do not rely on a lumped-element description of the superconducting circuit, in contrast to previous approaches to tackling this problem. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach by characterizing the driven properties of realistic circuit devices in complex electromagnetic environments, including coherent dynamics due to charge and flux modulation, as well as drive-induced relaxation and dephasing. Our techniques offer a powerful toolbox for optimizing circuit designs and advancing practical applications in superconducting quantum computing.
Decoherence errors arising from noisy environments remain a central obstacle to progress in quantum computation and information processing. Quantum error correction (QEC) based on theGottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) protocol offers a powerful strategy to overcome this challenge, with successful demonstrations in trapped ions, superconducting circuits, and photonics. Beyond active QEC, a compelling alternative is to engineer Hamiltonians that intrinsically enforce stabilizers, offering passive protection akin to topological models. Inspired by the GKP encoding scheme, we implement a superconducting qubit whose eigenstates form protected grid states – long envisioned but not previously realized – by integrating an effective Cooper-quartet junction with a quantum phase-slip element embedded in a high-impedance circuit. Spectroscopic measurements reveal pairs of degenerate states separated by large energy gaps, in excellent agreement with theoretical predictions. Remarkably, our observations indicate that the circuit tolerates small disorders and gains robustness against environmental noise as its parameters approach the ideal regime, establishing a new framework for exploring superconducting hardware. These findings also showcase the versatility of the superconducting circuit toolbox, setting the stage for future exploration of advanced solid-state devices with emergent properties.
Superconducting radio-frequency (SRF) cavities offer a promising platform for quantum computing due to their long coherence times and large accessible Hilbert spaces, yet integratingnonlinear elements like transmons for control often introduces additional loss. We report a multimode quantum system based on a 2-cell elliptical shaped SRF cavity, comprising two cavity modes weakly coupled to an ancillary transmon circuit, designed to preserve coherence while enabling efficient control of the cavity modes. We mitigate the detrimental effects of the transmon decoherence through careful design optimization that reduces transmon-cavity couplings and participation in the dielectric substrate and lossy interfaces, to achieve single-photon lifetimes of 20.6 ms and 15.6 ms for the two modes, and a pure dephasing time exceeding 40 ms. This marks an order-of-magnitude improvement over prior 3D multimode memories. Leveraging sideband interactions and novel error-resilient protocols, including measurement-based correction and post-selection, we achieve high-fidelity control over quantum states. This enables the preparation of Fock states up to N=20 with fidelities exceeding 95%, the highest reported to date to the authors‘ knowledge, as well as two-mode entanglement with coherence-limited fidelities reaching up to 99.9% after post-selection. These results establish our platform as a robust foundation for quantum information processing, allowing for future extensions to high-dimensional qudit encodings.
Superconducting quantum circuits rely on strong drives to implement fast gates, high-fidelity readout, and state stabilization. However, these drives can induce uncontrolled excitations,so-called „ionization“, that compromise the fidelity of these operations. While now well-characterized in the context of qubit readout, it remains unclear how general this limitation is across the more general setting of parametric control. Here, we demonstrate that a nonlinear coupler, exemplified by a transmon, undergoes ionization under strong parametric driving, leading to a breakdown of coherent control and thereby limiting the accessible gate speeds. Through experiments and numerical simulations, we associate this behavior with the emergence of drive-induced chaotic dynamics, which we characterize quantitatively using the instantaneous Floquet spectrum. Our results reveal that the Floquet spectrum provides a unifying framework for understanding strong-drive limitations across a wide range of operations on superconducting quantum circuits. This insight establishes fundamental constraints on parametric control and offers design principles for mitigating drive-induced decoherence in next-generation quantum processors.
Disordered superconducting materials with high kinetic inductance are an important resource to generate nonlinearity in quantum circuits and create high-impedance environments. In thinfilms fabricated from these materials, the combination of disorder and the low effective dimensionality leads to increased order parameter fluctuations and enhanced kinetic inductance values. Among the challenges of harnessing these compounds in coherent devices are their proximity to the superconductor-insulator phase transition, the presence of broken Cooper pairs, and the two-level systems located in the disordered structure. In this work, we fabricate tungsten silicide wires from quasi-two-dimensional films with one spatial dimension smaller than the superconducting coherence length and embed them into microwave resonators and fluxonium qubits, where the kinetic inductance provides the inductive part of the circuits. We study the dependence of loss on the frequency, disorder, and geometry of the device, and find that the loss increases with the level of disorder and is dominated by the localized quasiparticles trapped in the spatial variations of the superconducting gap.
The fluxonium qubit is a promising candidate for quantum computation due to its long coherence times and large anharmonicity. We present a tunable coupler that realizes strong inductivecoupling between two heavy-fluxonium qubits, each with ∼50MHz frequencies and ∼5 GHz anharmonicities. The coupler enables the qubits to have a large tuning range of XX coupling strengths (−35 to 75 MHz). The ZZ coupling strength is <3kHz across the entire coupler bias range, and <100Hz at the coupler off-position. These qualities lead to fast, high-fidelity single- and two-qubit gates. By driving at the difference frequency of the two qubits, we realize a iSWAP‾‾‾‾‾‾‾√ gate in 258ns with fidelity 99.72%, and by driving at the sum frequency of the two qubits, we achieve a bSWAP‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾√ gate in 102ns with fidelity 99.91%. This latter gate is only 5 qubit Larmor periods in length. We run cross-entropy benchmarking for over 20 consecutive hours and measure stable gate fidelities, with bSWAP‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾√ drift (2σ) <0.02% and iSWAP‾‾‾‾‾‾‾√ drift <0.08%.[/expand]
We present a novel transmon qubit fabrication technique that yields systematic improvements in T1 coherence times. We fabricate devices using an encapsulation strategy that involvespassivating the surface of niobium and thereby preventing the formation of its lossy surface oxide. By maintaining the same superconducting metal and only varying the surface structure, this comparative investigation examining different capping materials and film substrates across different qubit foundries definitively demonstrates the detrimental impact that niobium oxides have on the coherence times of superconducting qubits, compared to native oxides of tantalum, aluminum or titanium nitride. Our surface-encapsulated niobium qubit devices exhibit T1 coherence times 2 to 5 times longer than baseline niobium qubit devices with native niobium oxides. When capping niobium with tantalum, we obtain median qubit lifetimes above 200 microseconds. Our comparative structural and chemical analysis suggests that amorphous niobium suboxides may induce higher losses. These results are in line with high-accuracy measurements of the niobium oxide loss tangent obtained with ultra-high Q superconducting radiofrequency (SRF) cavities. This new surface encapsulation strategy enables further reduction of dielectric losses via passivation with ambient-stable materials, while preserving fabrication and scalable manufacturability thanks to the compatibility with silicon processes.
Long coherence times, large anharmonicity and robust charge-noise insensitivity render fluxonium qubits an interesting alternative to transmons. Recent experiments have demonstratedrecord coherence times for low-frequency fluxonia. Here, we propose a galvanic-coupling scheme with flux-tunable XX coupling. To implement a high-fidelity entangling iSWAP‾‾‾‾‾‾‾√ gate, we modulate the strength of this coupling and devise variable-time identity gates to synchronize required single-qubit operations. Both types of gates are implemented using strong ac flux drives, lasting for only a few drive periods. We employ a theoretical framework capable of capturing qubit dynamics beyond the rotating-wave approximation (RWA) as required for such strong drives. We predict an open-system fidelity of F>0.999 for the iSWAP‾‾‾‾‾‾‾√ gate under realistic conditions.
The development of new superconducting circuits and the improvement of existing ones rely on the accurate modeling of spectral properties which are key to achieving the needed advancesin qubit performance. Systematic circuit analysis at the lumped-element level, starting from a circuit network and culminating in a Hamiltonian appropriately describing the quantum properties of the circuit, is a well-established procedure, yet cumbersome to carry out manually for larger circuits. We present work utilizing symbolic computer algebra and numerical diagonalization routines versatile enough to tackle a variety of circuits. Results from this work are accessible through a newly released module of the scqubits package.