Materials improvements are a powerful approach to reducing loss and decoherence in superconducting qubits because such improvements can be readily translated to large scale processors.Recent work improved transmon coherence by utilizing tantalum (Ta) as a base layer and sapphire as a substrate. The losses in these devices are dominated by two-level systems (TLSs) with comparable contributions from both the surface and bulk dielectrics, indicating that both must be tackled to achieve major improvements in the state of the art. Here we show that replacing the substrate with high-resistivity silicon (Si) dramatically decreases the bulk substrate loss, enabling 2D transmons with time-averaged quality factors (Q) exceeding 1.5 x 10^7, reaching a maximum Q of 2.5 x 10^7, corresponding to a lifetime (T_1) of up to 1.68 ms. This low loss allows us to observe decoherence effects related to the Josephson junction, and we use improved, low-contamination junction deposition to achieve Hahn echo coherence times (T_2E) exceeding T_1. We achieve these material improvements without any modifications to the qubit architecture, allowing us to readily incorporate standard quantum control gates. We demonstrate single qubit gates with 99.994% fidelity. The Ta-on-Si platform comprises a simple material stack that can potentially be fabricated at wafer scale, and therefore can be readily translated to large-scale quantum processors.
In superconducting quantum devices, Purcell filters protect qubit information from decaying into external lines by reducing external coupling at qubit frequencies while maintainingit at readout frequencies. Here, we introduce and demonstrate a novel Purcell filter design that places the readout resonator frequencies in a „linewidth plateau“ below the filter’s first resonant mode. This approach, based on direct admittance engineering, can simultaneously achieve strong qubit protection and nearly constant external coupling across a wide readout bandwidth, addressing the traditional tradeoff between these properties. We first present a lumped-element analysis of our filters. We then experimentally demonstrate a compact on-chip linewidth-plateau filter, coupled to four resonators across its approximately 1 GHz readout band. We compare the measured linewidths to numerical predictions, and show how the filter protects a frequency-tunable transmon qubit from external decay. We envision that our flexible design paradigm will aid in efforts to create multiplexed readout architectures for superconducting quantum circuits, with well-controlled external couplings.
Advances in quantum engineering have enabled the design, measurement, and precise control of synthetic condensed matter systems. The platform of superconducting circuits offers twoparticular capabilities: flexible connectivity of circuit elements that enables a variety of lattice geometries, and circuit nonlinearity that provides access to strongly interacting physics. Separately, these features have allowed for the creation of curved-space lattices and the realization of strongly correlated phases and dynamics in one-dimensional chains and square lattices. Missing in this suite of simulations is the simultaneous integration of interacting particles into lattices with unique band dispersions, such as dispersionless flat bands. An ideal building block for flat-band physics is the Aharonov-Bohm cage: a single plaquette of a lattice whose band structure consists entirely of flat bands. Here, we experimentally construct an Aharonov-Bohm cage and observe the localization of a single photon, the hallmark of all-bands-flat physics. Upon placing an interaction-bound photon pair into the cage, we see a delocalized walk indicating an escape from Aharonov-Bohm caging. We further find that a variation of caging persists for two particles initialized on opposite sites of the cage. These results mark the first experimental work where interacting particles circumvent an Aharonov-Bohm cage and establish superconducting circuits for studies of flat-band-lattice dynamics with strong interactions.