Microwave-activated conditional-phase gate for superconducting qubits

  1. Jerry M. Chow,
  2. Jay M. Gambetta,
  3. Andrew W. Cross,
  4. Seth T. Merkel,
  5. Chad Rigetti,
  6. and M. Steffen
We introduce a new entangling gate between two fixed-frequency qubits statically coupled via a microwave resonator bus which combines the following desirable qualities: all-microwave
control, appreciable qubit separation for reduction of crosstalk and leakage errors, and the ability to function as a two-qubit conditional-phase gate. A fixed, always-on interaction is explicitly designed between higher energy (non-computational) states of two transmon qubits, and then a conditional-phase gate is `activated‘ on the otherwise unperturbed qubit subspace via a microwave drive. We implement this microwave-activated conditional-phase gate with a fidelity from quantum process tomography of 87%.

Improved superconducting qubit coherence using titanium nitride

  1. J. Chang,
  2. M. R. Vissers,
  3. A. D. Corcoles,
  4. M. Sandberg,
  5. J. Gao,
  6. David W. Abraham,
  7. Jerry M. Chow,
  8. Jay M. Gambetta,
  9. M. B. Rothwell,
  10. G. A. Keefe,
  11. Matthias Steffen,
  12. and D. P. Pappas
We demonstrate enhanced relaxation and dephasing times of transmon qubits, up to ~ 60 mu s by fabricating the interdigitated shunting capacitors using titanium nitride (TiN). Compared
to lift-off aluminum deposited simultaneously with the Josephson junction, this represents as much as a six-fold improvement and provides evidence that previous planar transmon coherence times are limited by surface losses from two-level system (TLS) defects residing at or near interfaces. Concurrently, we observe an anomalous temperature dependent frequency shift of TiN resonators which is inconsistent with the predicted TLS model.

Process verification of two-qubit quantum gates by randomized benchmarking

  1. A. D. Córcoles,
  2. Jay M. Gambetta,
  3. Jerry M. Chow,
  4. John A. Smolin,
  5. Matthew Ware,
  6. J. D. Strand,
  7. B. L. T. Plourde,
  8. and M. Steffen
We implement a complete randomized benchmarking protocol on a system of two superconducting qubits. The protocol consists of randomizing over gates in the Clifford group, which experimentally
are generated via an improved two-qubit cross-resonance gate implementation and single-qubit unitaries. From this we extract an optimal average error per Clifford of 0.0936. We also perform an interleaved experiment, alternating our optimal two-qubit gate with random two-qubit Clifford gates, to obtain a two-qubit gate error of 0.0653. We compare these values with a two-qubit gate error of ~0.12 obtained from quantum process tomography, which is likely limited by state preparation and measurement errors.

Characterization of addressability by simultaneous randomized benchmarking

  1. Jay M. Gambetta,
  2. A. D. Corcoles,
  3. S. T. Merkel,
  4. B. R. Johnson,
  5. John A. Smolin,
  6. Jerry M. Chow,
  7. Colm A. Ryan,
  8. Chad Rigetti,
  9. S. Poletto,
  10. Thomas A. Ohki,
  11. Mark B. Ketchen,
  12. and M. Steffen
The control and handling of errors arising from cross-talk and unwanted interactions in multi-qubit systems is an important issue in quantum information processing architectures. We
introduce a benchmarking protocol that provides information about the amount of addressability present in the system and implement it on coupled superconducting qubits. The protocol consists of randomized benchmarking each qubit individually and then simultaneously, and the amount of addressability is related to the difference of the average gate fidelities of those experiments. We present the results on two similar samples with different amounts of cross-talk and unwanted interactions, which agree with predictions based on simple models for the amount of residual coupling.

Superconducting qubit in waveguide cavity with coherence time approaching 0.1ms

  1. Chad Rigetti,
  2. Stefano Poletto,
  3. Jay M. Gambetta,
  4. B. L. T. Plourde,
  5. Jerry M. Chow,
  6. A. D. Corcoles,
  7. John A. Smolin,
  8. Seth T. Merkel,
  9. J. R. Rozen,
  10. George A. Keefe,
  11. Mary B. Rothwell,
  12. Mark B. Ketchen,
  13. and M. Steffen
We report a superconducting artificial atom with an observed quantum coherence time of T2*=95us and energy relaxation time T1=70us. The system consists of a single Josephson junction
transmon qubit embedded in an otherwise empty copper waveguide cavity whose lowest eigenmode is dispersively coupled to the qubit transition. We attribute the factor of four increase in the coherence quality factor relative to previous reports to device modifications aimed at reducing qubit dephasing from residual cavity photons. This simple device holds great promise as a robust and easily produced artificial quantum system whose intrinsic coherence properties are sufficient to allow tests of quantum error correction.