Lattice field theory for superconducting circuits

  1. Joshua Lin,
  2. Max Hays,
  3. Stephen Sorokanich III,
  4. Julian Bender,
  5. Phiala E. Shanahan,
  6. and Neill C. Warrington
Large superconducting quantum circuits have a number of important applications in quantum computing. Accurately predicting the performance of these devices from first principles is
challenging, as it requires solving the many-body Schrödinger equation. This work introduces a new, general ab-initio method for analyzing large quantum circuits based on lattice field theory, a tool commonly applied in nuclear and particle physics. This method is competitive with state-of-the-art techniques such as tensor networks, but avoids introducing systematic errors due to truncation of the infinite-dimensional Hilbert space associated with superconducting phases. The approach is applied to fluxonium, a specific many-component superconducting qubit with favorable qualities for quantum computation. A systematic study of the influence of impedance on fluxonium is conducted that parallels previous experimental studies, and ground capacitance effects are explored. The qubit frequency and charge noise dephasing rate are extracted from statistical analyses of charge noise, where thousands of instantiations of charge disorder in the Josephson junction array of a fixed fluxonium qubit are explicitly averaged over at the microscopic level. This is difficult to achieve with any other existing method.

Truncation-Free Quantum Simulation of Pure-Gauge Compact QED Using Josephson Arrays

  1. Guy Pardo,
  2. Julian Bender,
  3. Nadav Katz,
  4. and Erez Zohar
Quantum simulation is one of the methods that have been proposed and used in practice to bypass computational challenges in the investigation of lattice gauge theories. While most of
the proposals rely on truncating the infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces that these models feature, we propose a truncation-free method based on the exact analogy between the local Hilbert space of lattice QED and that of a Josephson junction. We provide several proposals, mostly semi-analog, arranged according to experimental difficulty. Our method can simulate a quasi-2D system of up to 2×N plaquettes, and we present an approximate method that can simulate the fully-2D theory, but is more demanding experimentally and not immediately feasible. This sets the ground for analog quantum simulation of lattice gauge theories with superconducting circuits, in a completely Hilbert space truncation-free procedure, for continuous gauge groups.