A central task towards building a practical quantum computer is to protect individual qubits from decoherence while retaining the ability to perform high-fidelity entangling gates involvingarbitrary two qubits. Here we propose and demonstrate a dephasing-insensitive procedure for storing and processing quantum information in an all-to-all connected superconducting circuit involving multiple frequency-tunable qubits, each of which can be controllably coupled to any other through a central bus resonator. Although it is generally believed that the extra frequency tunability enhances the control freedom but induces more dephasing impact for superconducting qubits, our results show that any individual qubit can be dynamically decoupled from dephasing noise by applying a weak continuous and resonant driving field whose phase is reversed in the middle of the pulse. More importantly, we demonstrate a new method for realizing two-qubit phase gate with inherent dynamical decoupling via the combination of continuous driving and qubit-qubit swapping coupling. We find that the weak continuous driving fields not only enable the conditional dynamics essential for quantum information processing, but also protect both qubits from dephasing during the gate operation.
Geometric phase, associated with holonomy transformation in quantum state space, is an important quantum-mechanical effect. Besides fundamental interest, this effect has practical applications,among which geometric quantum computation is a paradigm, where quantum logic operations are realized through geometric phase manipulation that has some intrinsic noise-resilient advantages and may enable simplified implementation of multiqubit gates compared to the dynamical approach. Here we report observation of a continuous-variable geometric phase and demonstrate a quantum gate protocol based on this phase in a superconducting circuit, where five qubits are controllably coupled to a resonator. Our geometric approach allows for one-step implementation of n-qubit controlled-phase gates, which represents a remarkable advantage compared to gate decomposition methods, where the number of required steps dramatically increases with n. Following this approach, we realize these gates with n up to 4, verifying the high efficiency of this geometric manipulation for quantum computation.
The law of statistical physics dictates that generic closed quantum many-body systems initialized in nonequilibrium will thermalize under their own dynamics. However, the emergenceof many-body localization (MBL) owing to the interplay between interaction and disorder, which is in stark contrast to Anderson localization that only addresses noninteracting particles in the presence of disorder, greatly challenges this concept because it prevents the systems from evolving to the ergodic thermalized state. One critical evidence of MBL is the long-time logarithmic growth of entanglement entropy, and a direct observation of it is still elusive due to the experimental challenges in multiqubit single-shot measurement and quantum state tomography. Here we present an experiment of fully emulating the MBL dynamics with a 10-qubit superconducting quantum processor, which represents a spin-1/2 XY model featuring programmable disorder and long-range spin-spin interactions. We provide essential signatures of MBL, such as the imbalance due to the initial nonequilibrium, the violation of eigenstate thermalization hypothesis, and, more importantly, the direct evidence of the long-time logarithmic growth of entanglement entropy. Our results lay solid foundations for precisely simulating the intriguing physics of quantum many-body systems on the platform of large-scale multiqubit superconducting quantum processors.
Here we report on the production and tomography of genuinely entangled Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states with up to 10 qubits connecting to a bus resonator in a superconducting circuit,where the resonator-mediated qubit-qubit interactions are used to controllably entangle multiple qubits and to operate on different pairs of qubits in parallel. The resulting 10-qubit density matrix is unambiguously probed, with a fidelity of 0.668±0.025. Our results demonstrate the largest entanglement created so far in solid-state architectures, and pave the way to large-scale quantum computation.
Superconducting quantum circuits are promising candidate for building scalable quantum computers. Here, we use a four-qubit superconducting quantum processor to solve a two-dimensionalsystem of linear equations based on a quantum algorithm proposed by Harrow, Hassidim, and Lloyd [Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{103}, 150502 (2009)], which promises an exponential speedup over classical algorithms under certain circumstances. We benchmark the solver with quantum inputs and outputs, and characterize it by non-trace-preserving quantum process tomography, which yields a process fidelity of 0.837±0.006. Our results highlight the potential of superconducting quantum circuits for applications in solving large-scale linear systems, a ubiquitous task in science and engineering.
High quality factor coplanar resonators are critical elements in superconducting quantum circuits. We describe the design, fabrication and measurement of stepped impedance resonators(SIRs), which have more compact size than commonly used uniform impedance resonators (UIRs). With properly chosen impedance ratio, SIRs can be much shorter in total length than that of UIRs. Two kinds of designs containing both SIRs and UIRs are fabricated and measured. The power dependence of the extracted internal quality factors (Qi) for all the resonators indicated that SIRs and UIRs had comparable performance at high incident power. However, as the incident power decreased, the internal quality factor of SIRs decreased much slower than that of UIRs. All the SIRs in design I kept near half-million Qi at single-photon level, while the two UIRs on the same chip decreased heavily to less than 2×105. These results indicate potential advantages of SIRs in quantum computer architectures: they consume less space than UIRs, while perform excellent under single-photon level. The resonators in design II were measured under a large residual magnetic field. The measured results showed that the internal quality factor of all the SIRs and UIRs were more or less suppressed. Such behavior confirmed that trapped vortices in the coplanar resonators provide another loss channel.
The engineering of quantum devices has reached the stage where we now have small scale quantum processors containing multiple interacting qubits within them. Simple quantum circuitshave been demonstrated and scaling up to larger numbers is underway. However as the number of qubits in these processors increases, it becomes challenging to implement switchable or tunable coherent coupling among them. The typical approach has been to detune each qubit from others or the quantum bus it connected to, but as the number of qubits increases this becomes problematic to achieve in practice due to frequency crowding issues. Here, we demonstrate that by applying a fast longitudinal control field to the target qubit, we can turn off its couplings to other qubits or buses (in principle on/off ratio higher than 100 dB). This has important implementations in superconducting circuits as it means we can keep the qubits at their optimal points, where the coherence properties are greatest, during coupling/decoupling processing. Our approach suggests a new way to control coupling among qubits and data buses that can be naturally scaled up to large quantum processors without the need for auxiliary circuits and yet be free of the frequency crowding problems.