Leakage, the occupation of any state not used in the computation, is one of the of the most devastating errors in quantum error correction. Transmons, the most common superconductingqubits, are weakly anharmonic multilevel systems, and are thus prone to this type of error. Here we demonstrate a device which reduces the lifetimes of the leakage states in the transmon by three orders of magnitude, while protecting the qubit lifetime and the single-qubit gate fidelties. To do this we attach a qubit through an on-chip seventh-order Chebyshev filter to a cold resistor. The filter is engineered such that the leakage transitions are in its passband, while the qubit transition is in its stopband. Dissipation through the filter reduces the lifetime of the transmon’s f state, the lowest energy leakage state, by three orders of magnitude to 33 ns, while simultaneously keeping the qubit lifetime to greater than 100 μs. Even though the f state is transiently populated during a single qubit gate, no negative effect of the filter is detected with errors per gate approaching 1e-4. Modelling the filter as coupled linear harmonic oscillators, our theoretical analysis of the device corroborate our experimental findings. This leakage reduction unit turns leakage errors into errors within the qubit subspace that are correctable with traditional quantum error correction. We demonstrate the operation of the filter as leakage reduction unit in a mock-up of a single-qubit quantum error correcting cycle, showing that the filter increases the seepage rate back to the qubit subspace.
It has long been known that the lifetimes of superconducting qubits suffer during readout, increasing readout errors. We show that this degradation is due to the anti-Zeno effect, asreadout-induced dephasing broadens the qubit so that it overlaps ‚hot spots‘ of strong dissipation, likely due to two-level systems in the qubit’s bath. Using a flux-tunable qubit to probe the qubit’s frequency dependent loss, we accurately predict the change in lifetime during readout with a new self-consistent master equation that incorporates the modification to qubit relaxation due to measurement-induced dephasing. Moreover, we controllably demonstrate both the Zeno and anti-Zeno effects, which explain suppression and the rarer enhancement of qubit lifetimes during readout.
Quantum computers can potentially achieve an exponential speedup versus classical computers on certain computational tasks, as was recently demonstrated in systems of superconductingqubits. However, these qubits have large footprints due to the need of ultra low-loss capacitors. The large electric field volume of \textit{quantum compatible} capacitors stems from their distributed nature. This hinders scaling by increasing parasitic coupling in circuit designs, degrading individual qubit addressability, and limiting the minimum achievable circuit area. Here, we report the use of van der Waals (vdW) materials to reduce the qubit area by a factor of >1000. These qubit structures combine parallel-plate capacitors comprising crystalline layers of superconducting niobium diselenide (NbSe2) and insulating hexagonal-boron nitride (hBN) with conventional aluminum-based Josephson junctions. We measure a vdW transmon T1 relaxation time of 1.06 μs, demonstrating that a highly-compact capacitor can reach a loss-tangent of <2.83×10−5. Our results demonstrate a promising path towards breaking the paradigm of requiring large geometric capacitors for long quantum coherence in superconducting qubits, and illustrate the broad utility of layered heterostructures in low-loss, high-coherence quantum devices.[/expand]
Measurements that occur within the internal layers of a quantum circuit — mid-circuit measurements — are an important quantum computing primitive, most notably for quantumerror correction. Mid-circuit measurements have both classical and quantum outputs, so they can be subject to error modes that do not exist for measurements that terminate quantum circuits. Here we show how to characterize mid-circuit measurements, modelled by quantum instruments, using a technique that we call quantum instrument linear gate set tomography (QILGST). We then apply this technique to characterize a dispersive measurement on a superconducting transmon qubit within a multiqubit system. By varying the delay time between the measurement pulse and subsequent gates, we explore the impact of residual cavity photon population on measurement error. QILGST can resolve different error modes and quantify the total error from a measurement; in our experiment, for delay times above 1000 ns we measured a total error rate (i.e., half diamond distance) of ϵ⋄=8.1±1.4%, a readout fidelity of 97.0±0.3%, and output quantum state fidelities of 96.7±0.6% and 93.7±0.7% when measuring 0 and 1, respectively.
Demonstrating the quantum computational advantage will require high-fidelity control and readout of multi-qubit systems. As system size increases, multiplexed qubit readout becomesa practical necessity to limit the growth of resource overhead. Many contemporary qubit-state discriminators presume single-qubit operating conditions or require considerable computational effort, limiting their potential extensibility. Here, we present multi-qubit readout using neural networks as state discriminators. We compare our approach to contemporary methods employed on a quantum device with five superconducting qubits and frequency-multiplexed readout. We find that fully-connected feedforward neural networks increase the qubit-state-assignment fidelity for our system. Relative to contemporary discriminators, the assignment error rate is reduced by up to 25 % due to the compensation of system-dependent nonidealities such as readout crosstalk which is reduced by up to one order of magnitude. Our work demonstrates a potentially extensible building block for high-fidelity readout relevant to both near-term devices and future fault-tolerant systems.
Microwave squeezing represents the ultimate sensitivity frontier for superconducting qubit measurement. However, observation of enhancement has remained elusive, in part because integrationwith conventional dispersive readout pollutes the signal channel with antisqueezed vacuum. Here we induce a stroboscopic light-matter coupling with superior squeezing compatibility, and observe an increase in the room-temperature signal-to-noise ratio of 24%. Squeezing the orthogonal phase controls measurement backaction, slowing dephasing by a factor of 1.8. This protocol enables the practical use of microwave squeezing for qubit state measurement.
We introduce and analyze a dispersive qubit readout scheme where two-mode squeezing is generated directly in the measurement cavities. The resulting suppression of noise enables fast,high- fidelity readout of naturally weakly coupled qubits, and the possibility to protect strongly coupled qubits from decoherence by weakening their coupling. Unlike other approaches exploiting squeezing, our setup avoids the difficult task of transporting and injecting with high fidelity an externally-generated squeezed state. Our setup is also surprisingly robust against unwanted non-QND backaction effects, as interference naturally suppresses Purcell decay: the system acts as its own Purcell filter. Our setup is compatible with the experimental state-of-the-art in circuit QED systems, but the basic idea could also be realized in other systems.
Readout of the state of a superconducting qubit by homodyne detection of the output signal from a dispersively coupled microwave resonator is a common technique in circuit quantum electrodynamics,and is often claimed to be quantum non-demolition (QND) up to the same order of approximation as in the dispersive approximation. However, in this work we show that only in the limit of infinite measurement time is this protocol QND, as the formation of a dressed coherent state in the qubit-cavity system applies an effective rotation to the qubit state. We show how this rotation can be corrected by a coherent operation, leading to improved qubit initialization by measurement and coherent feedback.
Parity measurement is a central tool to many quantum information processing tasks. In this Letter, we propose a method to directly measure two- and four-qubit parity with low overheadin hard- and software, while remaining robust to experimental imperfections. Our scheme relies on dispersive qubit-cavity coupling and photon counting that is sensitive only to intensity; both ingredients are widely realized in many different quantum computing modalities. For a leading technology in quantum computing, superconducting integrated circuits, we analyze the measurement contrast and the back action of the scheme and show that this measurement comes close enough to an ideal parity measurement to be applicable to quantum error correction.
High-fidelity, efficient quantum nondemolition readout of quantum bits is integral to the goal of quantum computation. As superconducting circuits approach the requirements of scalable,universal fault tolerance, qubit readout must also meet the demand of simplicity to scale with growing system size. Here we propose a fast, high-fidelity, scalable measurement scheme based on the state-selective ring-up of a cavity followed by photodetection with the recently introduced Josephson photomultiplier (JPM), a current-biased Josephson junction. This scheme maps qubit state information to the binary digital output of the JPM, circumventing the need for room-temperature heterodyne detection and offering the possibility of a cryogenic interface to superconducting digital control circuitry. Numerics show that measurement contrast in excess of 95% is achievable in a measurement time of 140 ns. We discuss perspectives to scale this scheme to enable readout of multiple qubit channels with a single JPM.