The superconducting transmon qubit is a leading platform for quantum computing and quantum science. Building large, useful quantum systems based on transmon qubits will require significantimprovements in qubit relaxation and coherence times, which are orders of magnitude shorter than limits imposed by bulk properties of the constituent materials. This indicates that relaxation likely originates from uncontrolled surfaces, interfaces, and contaminants. Previous efforts to improve qubit lifetimes have focused primarily on designs that minimize contributions from surfaces. However, significant improvements in the lifetime of two-dimensional transmon qubits have remained elusive for several years. Here, we fabricate two-dimensional transmon qubits that have both lifetimes and coherence times with dynamical decoupling exceeding 0.3 milliseconds by replacing niobium with tantalum in the device. We have observed increased lifetimes for seventeen devices, indicating that these material improvements are robust, paving the way for higher gate fidelities in multi-qubit processors.
Materials science and the study of the electronic properties of solids are a major field of interest in both physics and engineering. The starting point for all such calculations issingle-electron, or non-interacting, band structure calculations, and in the limit of strong on-site confinement this can be reduced to graph-like tight-binding models. In this context, both mathematicians and physicists have developed largely independent methods for solving these models. In this paper we will combine and present results from both fields. In particular, we will discuss a class of lattices which can be realized as line graphs of other lattices, both in Euclidean and hyperbolic space. These lattices display highly unusual features including flat bands and localized eigenstates of compact support. We will use the methods of both fields to show how these properties arise and systems for classifying the phenomenology of these lattices, as well as criteria for maximizing the gaps. Furthermore, we will present a particular hardware implementation using superconducting coplanar waveguide resonators that can realize a wide variety of these lattices in both non-interacting and interacting form.
After close to two decades of research and development, superconducting circuits have emerged as a rich platform for both quantum computation and quantum simulation. Lattices of superconductingcoplanar waveguide (CPW) resonators have been shown to produce artificial materials for microwave photons, where weak interactions can be introduced either via non-linear resonator materials or strong interactions via qubit-resonator coupling. Here, we introduce a technique using networks of CPW resonators to create a new class of materials which constitute regular lattices in an effective hyperbolic space with constant negative curvature. We show numerical simulations of a class of hyperbolic analogs of the kagome lattice which show unusual densities of states with a spectrally-isolated degenerate flat band. We also present an experimental realization of one of these lattices, exhibiting the aforementioned band structure. This paper represents the first step towards on-chip quantum simulation of materials science and interacting particles in curved space.
Condensed matter physics has been driven forward by significant experimental and theoretical progress in the study and understanding of equilibrium phase transitions based on symmetryand topology. However, nonequilibrium phase transitions have remained a challenge, in part due to their complexity in theoretical descriptions and the additional experimental difficulties in systematically controlling systems out of equilibrium. Here, we study a one-dimensional chain of 72 microwave cavities, each coupled to a superconducting qubit, and coherently drive the system into a nonequilibrium steady state. We find experimental evidence for a dissipative phase transition in the system in which the steady state changes dramatically as the mean photon number is increased. Near the boundary between the two observed phases, the system demonstrates bistability, with characteristic switching times as long as 60 ms — far longer than any of the intrinsic rates known for the system. This experiment demonstrates the power of circuit QED systems for studying nonequilibrium condensed matter physics and paves the way for future experiments exploring nonequilbrium physics with many-body quantum optics.