Coupler-Assisted Leakage Reduction for Scalable Quantum Error Correction with Superconducting Qubits

  1. Xiaohan Yang,
  2. Ji Chu,
  3. Zechen Guo,
  4. Wenhui Huang,
  5. Yongqi Liang,
  6. Jiawei Liu,
  7. Jiawei Qiu,
  8. Xuandong Sun,
  9. Ziyu Tao,
  10. Jiawei Zhang,
  11. Jiajian Zhang,
  12. Libo Zhang,
  13. Yuxuan Zhou,
  14. Weijie Guo,
  15. Ling Hu,
  16. Ji Jiang,
  17. Yang Liu,
  18. Xiayu Linpeng,
  19. Tingyong Chen,
  20. Yuanzhen Chen,
  21. Jingjing Niu,
  22. Song Liu,
  23. Youpeng Zhong,
  24. and Dapeng Yu
Superconducting qubits are a promising platform for building fault-tolerant quantum computers, with recent achievement showing the suppression of logical error with increasing code
size. However, leakage into non-computational states, a common issue in practical quantum systems including superconducting circuits, introduces correlated errors that undermine QEC scalability. Here, we propose and demonstrate a leakage reduction scheme utilizing tunable couplers, a widely adopted ingredient in large-scale superconducting quantum processors. Leveraging the strong frequency tunability of the couplers and stray interaction between the couplers and readout resonators, we eliminate state leakage on the couplers, thus suppressing space-correlated errors caused by population propagation among the couplers. Assisted by the couplers, we further reduce leakage to higher qubit levels with high efficiency (98.1%) and low error rate on the computational subspace (0.58%), suppressing time-correlated errors during QEC cycles. The performance of our scheme demonstrates its potential as an indispensable building block for scalable QEC with superconducting qubits.

Low-loss interconnects for modular superconducting quantum processors

  1. Jingjing Niu,
  2. Libo Zhang,
  3. Yang Liu,
  4. Jiawei Qiu,
  5. Wenhui Huang,
  6. Jiaxiang Huang,
  7. Hao Jia,
  8. Jiawei Liu,
  9. Ziyu Tao,
  10. Weiwei Wei,
  11. Yuxuan Zhou,
  12. Wanjing Zou,
  13. Yuanzhen Chen,
  14. Xiaowei Deng,
  15. Xiuhao Deng,
  16. Changkang Hu,
  17. Ling Hu,
  18. Jian Li,
  19. Dian Tan,
  20. Yuan Xu,
  21. Fei Yan,
  22. Tongxing Yan,
  23. Song Liu,
  24. Youpeng Zhong,
  25. Andrew N. Cleland,
  26. and Dapeng Yu
Scaling is now a key challenge in superconducting quantum computing. One solution is to build modular systems in which smaller-scale quantum modules are individually constructed and
calibrated, and then assembled into a larger architecture. This, however, requires the development of suitable interconnects. Here, we report low-loss interconnects based on pure aluminium coaxial cables and on-chip impedance transformers featuring quality factors up to 8.1×105, which is comparable to the performance of our transmon qubits fabricated on single-crystal sapphire substrate. We use these interconnects to link five quantum modules with inter-module quantum state transfer and Bell state fidelities up to 99\%. To benchmark the overall performance of the processor, we create maximally-entangled, multi-qubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states. The generated inter-module four-qubit GHZ state exhibits 92.0\% fidelity. We also entangle up to 12 qubits in a GHZ state with 55.8±1.8% fidelity, which is above the genuine multipartite entanglement threshold of 1/2. These results represent a viable modular approach for large-scale superconducting quantum processors.