Advances in solid-state physics, materials science, and device engineering have accelerated the development of superconducting qubits. Among emerging platforms, van der Waals (vdW)materials and their heterostructures are potentially attractive building blocks for quantum devices, yet their realization in qubit architectures remains largely underexplored. Here we report an all-vdW superconducting qubit based on a NbSe2-hBN-NbSe2 junction, in which a thin hBN layer simultaneously provides Josephson coupling and capacitive shunting between two NbSe2 islands, forming a „merged-element“ transmon. Temporal characterization using circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) techniques yields an average energy-relaxation time T1,avg=55 μs, Hahn-echo coherence time T2E,avg=21 μs, and Ramsey coherence time T2R,avg=1.9 μs. The relatively low Ramsey time is primarily attributable to an enhanced sensitivity to charge noise consistent with the realized device parameters and not a fundamental limitation. These results show that lumped-element superconducting qubits based on vdW heterostructures can achieve coherence times comparable to those of conventional Al-AlOx-Al qubits, while offering a reduced device footprint and suppressed stray capacitive coupling.
Echoed Conditional Displacement (ECD) gates constitute a fundamental building block for quantum control of harmonic oscillator modes. However, bit-flips of the auxiliary qubit remaina dominant error mechanism for this kind of bosonic control. In this work, we present a numerical case study of a bit-flip protected fluxonium operating as the control qubit and numerically implement ECD gates in a single-mode resonator-fluxonium device, demonstrating that fidelities exceeding 99.9% are possible. We systematically investigate the resonator dynamics using a combination of semiclassical trajectories and master equation simulations, numerically revealing asymptotic saturation of the dispersive shift in the strongly driven regime of the resonator. We develop an efficient technique to numerically simulate the strongly driven regime of the resonator using a semiclassical formulation that maps the full perturbation series in the dispersive expansion as order-by-order frequency shifts. This provides a compact polynomial description of the resonator which is intuitive and remains valid throughout the dispersive regime. Furthermore, we propose an improved ECD sequence that accounts for the effects of photon loss and spurious nonlinear terms on resonator trajectories.
Parasitic two-level-system (TLS) defects are a major source of energy relaxation and temporal instability in superconducting quantum processors. Our sub-second adaptive spectroscopyreveals telegraphic switching of TLSs with a characteristic timescale of a few seconds and spectral diffusion with diffusivity D≈0.9 MHz2/s. These timescales are about 3×102 times faster than what is observed in conventional nonadaptive spectroscopy, which typically requires hours of measurement time. We resolve such fast dynamics on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based controller that enables measurement of frequency- and time-resolved relaxations with sub-second temporal resolution in flux-tunable superconducting qubits. We observe similar defect dynamics across multiple qubits in independently fabricated devices measured in different laboratories. We correlate TLS-induced fluctuations with gate-level errors using randomized benchmarking. Our results reveal a previously inaccessible regime of frequency-resolved TLS dynamics and redefine the timescales relevant to TLS-aware characterization and calibration of superconducting quantum processors.
Erasure-error detection can improve the efficiency of quantum error correction by revealing the times and locations of their error events. In this work, we demonstrate erasure conversionsand mid-circuit erasure detections in a single integer fluxonium, in which the states |g⟩,|f⟩ encode the logical states and |e⟩ encodes the erasure state. The integer fluxonium suppresses direct |f⟩→|g⟩ transitions and allows the dominant |f⟩→|e⟩ transitions to be converted into detectable erasures. Furthermore, we identified a design space that nullifies the resonant-frequency shift between the two logical states, enabling ancilla-free mid-circuit erasure checks using the same resonator employed for final readout. By discarding the detected erasure events, we achieved an 8.4-fold increase in the |f⟩ state lifetime, a 1.38-fold increase in the Hahn-echo time, and a reduction of single-qubit gate error from 0.061(2)% to 0.030(5)%. Our results establish integer fluxonium as a hardware-efficient platform for erasure-error detection and conversion, while identifying the improvements required to realize an effective erasure qubit with high erasure bias.
Nonequilibrium quasiparticles (QPs) generated by stray infrared and ionizing radiation can limit the performance of superconducting quantum processors and present challenges for quantumerror correction schemes. Models of QP-induced energy relaxation commonly assume that the characteristic energy of the QPs and the qubit transition energy are both small relative to the superconducting gap. Under these assumptions, certain qubits such as the fluxonium would exhibit protection against QP-induced dissipation at specific bias points. Here, we show that this is not necessarily the case, numerically analyzing the predicted rate of QP-induced dissipation in fluxonium qubits for different QP energy distributions and for QPs created via photon-assisted tunneling processes. We find that accounting for small numerical factors, existing theoretical models predict sensitivity to QP-induced errors at bias points previously thought to be protected. We find that inclusion of asymmetry in the superconducting gap energy across the junction can reintroduce suppression of QP-induced relaxation, as expected. Additionally, for QPs created by photon-assisted tunneling, we predict that T1 protection will only occur for a specific energy of pair-breaking radiation. This understanding of fluxonium sensitivity to QP-induced dissipation informs the development of fluxonium-based processors and future QP-mitigation strategies.
Non-Hermitian systems exhibit phenomena absent from Hermitian systems, including exceptional points (EPs), at which two or more eigenvectors coalesce. Conventional implementations relyon gain and loss, which strongly limit quantum coherence. Here, following a proposal by Wang and Clerk (PRA 2019), we realize a closed four-mode quantum system that emulates the dynamics of a PT dimer – two coupled resonators with balanced gain and loss – without engineered dissipation. The four modes are implemented as harmonics of a superconducting coplanar-waveguide resonator, with parametric couplings engineered using a current-pumped SNAIL. We use this device as a sensor for small variations in the PT dimer coupling strength. From signal-to-noise-ratio measurements, we observe enhanced sensitivity near the EP in a non-quantum-limited regime.
Quantum interconnects distribute entanglement via controlled light-matter interactions for quantum computing and sensing applications. Many entanglement generation schemes use coherent,reversible interactions that require precisely calibrated pulses to execute. In contrast, driven-dissipative protocols use a continuous-wave drive in the presence of correlated dissipation to stabilize entanglement in protected (dark) states. However, the same dissipation that generates the entanglement also limits its utility once the stabilization protocol ends. Here, we engineer a superconducting system of two giant artificial atoms coupled sequentially to a waveguide, with tunable individual and correlated dissipation enabled by interference between coupling points. Continuously driving the atoms through the waveguide exploits correlated dissipation to generate remote entanglement. We then tune the qubit frequencies in situ to suppress individual dissipation and thereby preserve the entanglement, achieving a Bell-state fidelity F = 0.89 +/- 0.02. This demonstration indicates that the driven dissipation of giant atoms is a viable approach for distributing entanglement across quantum networks.
Errors in superconducting qubits that are correlated in time and space can pose problems for quantum error correction codes. Radiation from cosmic and terrestrial sources can increasethe quasiparticle (QP) density in a superconducting qubit device, resulting in an increased rate of QPs tunneling across proximal Josephson junctions (JJs) and causing correlated errors. Mechanical vibrations, such as those induced by the pulse tube in a dry dilution refrigerator, are also a known source of correlated errors. We present a method for distinguishing these two types of errors by their temporal, spatial, and frequency domain features, enabling physically motivated error-mitigation strategies. We also present accelerometer data to study the correlation between dilution refrigerator vibrations and the errors. We measure arrays of transmon qubits where the difference in superconducting gap across the JJ is less than the qubit energy, as well as those where the gap is greater than the qubit energy, which has been shown to mitigate radiation-induced errors. We show that these latter devices are also protected against vibration-induced errors.
Impacts from high-energy particles cause correlated errors in superconducting qubits by increasing the quasiparticle density in the vicinity of the Josephson junctions (JJs). Such errorsare particularly harmful as they cannot be easily remedied via conventional error correcting codes. Recent experiments reduced correlated errors by making the difference in superconducting gap energy across the JJ larger than the qubit energy. In this work, we assess gap engineering near the JJ (δΔJJ) and the capacitor/ground-plane (δΔM1) by exposing arrays of transmon qubits to two sources of radiation. For α-particles from an 241Am source, we observe T1 errors correlated in space and time, supporting a hypothesis that hadronic cosmic rays are a major contributor to the 10−10 error floor observed in Ref. 1. For electrons from a pulsed linear accelerator, we observe temporally correlated T1 and T2 errors, this measurement is insensitive to spatial correlations. We observe that the severity of correlated T1 errors is reduced for qubit arrays with a greater degree of gap engineering at the JJ. For both T1 and T2 errors, the recovery time is hastened by an increased δΔM1, which we attribute to the trapping of quasiparticles into the capacitor/ground-plane. We construct a model of quasiparticle dynamics that qualitatively agrees with our observations. This work reinforces the multifaceted influence of radiation on superconducting qubits and provides strategies for improving radiation resilience.
Large superconducting quantum circuits have a number of important applications in quantum computing. Accurately predicting the performance of these devices from first principles ischallenging, 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.