Modeling Phonon-mediated Quasiparticle Poisoning in Superconducting Qubit Arrays

  1. Eric Yelton,
  2. Clayton P. Larson,
  3. Vito Iaia,
  4. Kenneth Dodge,
  5. Guglielmo La Magna,
  6. Paul G. Baity,
  7. Ivan V. Pechenezhskiy,
  8. Robert McDermott,
  9. Noah Kurinsky,
  10. Gianluigi Catelani,
  11. and Britton L. T. Plourde
Correlated errors caused by ionizing radiation impacting superconducting qubit chips are problematic for quantum error correction. Such impacts generate quasiparticle (QP) excitations
in the qubit electrodes, which temporarily reduce qubit coherence significantly. The many energetic phonons produced by a particle impact travel efficiently throughout the device substrate and generate quasiparticles with high probability, thus causing errors on a large fraction of the qubits in an array simultaneously. We describe a comprehensive strategy for the numerical simulation of the phonon and quasiparticle dynamics in the aftermath of an impact. We compare the simulations with experimental measurements of phonon-mediated QP poisoning and demonstrate that our modeling captures the spatial and temporal footprint of the QP poisoning for various configurations of phonon downconversion structures. We thus present a path forward for the operation of superconducting quantum processors in the presence of ionizing radiation.

Single Flux Quantum-Based Digital Control of Superconducting Qubits in a Multi-Chip Module

  1. Chuan-Hong Liu,
  2. Andrew Ballard,
  3. David Olaya,
  4. Daniel R. Schmidt,
  5. John Biesecker,
  6. Tammy Lucas,
  7. Joel Ullom,
  8. Shravan Patel,
  9. Owen Rafferty,
  10. Alexander Opremcak,
  11. Kenneth Dodge,
  12. Vito Iaia,
  13. Tianna McBroom,
  14. Jonathan L Dubois,
  15. Pete F. Hopkins,
  16. Samuel P. Benz,
  17. Britton L. T. Plourde,
  18. and Robert McDermott
The single flux quantum (SFQ) digital superconducting logic family has been proposed for the scalable control of next-generation superconducting qubit arrays. In the initial implementation,
SFQ-based gate fidelity was limited by quasiparticle (QP) poisoning induced by the dissipative on-chip SFQ driver circuit. In this work, we introduce a multi-chip module architecture to suppress phonon-mediated QP poisoning. Here, the SFQ elements and qubits are fabricated on separate chips that are joined with In bump bonds. We use interleaved randomized benchmarking to characterize the fidelity of SFQ-based gates, and we demonstrate an error per Clifford gate of 1.2(1)%, an order-of-magnitude reduction over the gate error achieved in the initial realization of SFQ-based qubit control. We use purity benchmarking to quantify the contribution of incoherent error at 0.96(2)%; we attribute this error to photon-mediated QP poisoning mediated by the resonant mm-wave antenna modes of the qubit and SFQ-qubit coupler. We anticipate that a straightforward redesign of the SFQ driver circuit to limit the bandwidth of the SFQ pulses will eliminate this source of infidelity, allowing SFQ-based gates with fidelity approaching theoretical limits, namely 99.9% for resonant sequences and 99.99% for more complex pulse sequences involving variable pulse-to-pulse separation.

Digital coherent control of a superconducting qubit

  1. Edward Leonard Jr.,
  2. Matthew A. Beck,
  3. JJ Nelson,
  4. Brad G. Christensen,
  5. Ted Thorbeck,
  6. Caleb Howington,
  7. Alexander Opremcak,
  8. Ivan V. Pechenezhskiy,
  9. Kenneth Dodge,
  10. Nicholas P. Dupuis,
  11. Jaseung Ku,
  12. Francisco Schlenker,
  13. Joseph Suttle,
  14. Christopher Wilen,
  15. Shaojiang Zhu,
  16. Maxim G. Vavilov,
  17. Britton L. T. Plourde,
  18. and Robert McDermott
High-fidelity gate operations are essential to the realization of a fault-tolerant quantum computer. In addition, the physical resources required to implement gates must scale efficiently
with system size. A longstanding goal of the superconducting qubit community is the tight integration of a superconducting quantum circuit with a proximal classical cryogenic control system. Here we implement coherent control of a superconducting transmon qubit using a Single Flux Quantum (SFQ) pulse driver cofabricated on the qubit chip. The pulse driver delivers trains of quantized flux pulses to the qubit through a weak capacitive coupling; coherent rotations of the qubit state are realized when the pulse-to-pulse timing is matched to a multiple of the qubit oscillation period. We measure the fidelity of SFQ-based gates to be ~95% using interleaved randomized benchmarking. Gate fidelities are limited by quasiparticle generation in the dissipative SFQ driver. We characterize the dissipative and dispersive contributions of the quasiparticle admittance and discuss mitigation strategies to suppress quasiparticle poisoning. These results open the door to integration of large-scale superconducting qubit arrays with SFQ control elements for low-latency feedback and stabilization.