Lattice field theory for superconducting circuits

  1. Joshua Lin,
  2. Max Hays,
  3. Stephen Sorokanich III,
  4. Julian Bender,
  5. Phiala E. Shanahan,
  6. and Neill C. Warrington
Large superconducting quantum circuits have a number of important applications in quantum computing. Accurately predicting the performance of these devices from first principles is
challenging, 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.

Exact and approximate fluxonium array modes

  1. Stephen Sorokanich,
  2. Max Hays,
  3. and Neill C. Warrington
We present an exact solution for the linearized junction array modes of the superconducting qubit fluxonium in the absence of array disorder. This solution holds for arrays of any length
and ground capacitance, and for both differential and grounded devices. Array mode energies are determined by roots of convex combinations of Chebyshev polynomials, and their spatial profiles are plane waves. We also provide a simple, approximate solution, which estimates array mode properties over a wide range of circuit parameters, and an accompanying Mathematica file that implements both the exact and approximate solutions.