We report on a device that integrates eight superconducting transmon qubits in lambda/4 superconducting coplanar waveguide resonators fed from a common feedline. Using this multiplexingarchitecture, each resonator and qubit can be addressed individually thus reducing the required hardware resources and allowing their individual characterisation by spectroscopic methods. The measured device parameters agree with the designed values and the resonators and qubits exhibit excellent coherence properties and strong coupling, with the qubit relaxation rate dominated by the Purcell effect when brought in resonance with the resonator. Our analysis shows that the circuit is suitable for generation of single microwave photons on demand with an efficiency exceeding 80%.
Quantum data is susceptible to decoherence induced by the environment and to errors in the hardware processing it. A future fault-tolerant quantum computer will use quantum error correction(QEC) to actively protect against both. In the smallest QEC codes, the information in one logical qubit is encoded in a two-dimensional subspace of a larger Hilbert space of multiple physical qubits. For each code, a set of non-demolition multi-qubit measurements, termed stabilizers, can discretize and signal physical qubit errors without collapsing the encoded information. Experimental demonstrations of QEC to date, using nuclear magnetic resonance, trapped ions, photons, superconducting qubits, and NV centers in diamond, have circumvented stabilizers at the cost of decoding at the end of a QEC cycle. This decoding leaves the quantum information vulnerable to physical qubit errors until re-encoding, violating a basic requirement for fault tolerance. Using a five-qubit superconducting processor, we realize the two parity measurements comprising the stabilizers of the three-qubit repetition code protecting one logical qubit from physical bit-flip errors. We construct these stabilizers as parallelized indirect measurements using ancillary qubits, and evidence their non-demolition character by generating three-qubit entanglement from superposition states. We demonstrate stabilizer-based quantum error detection (QED) by subjecting a logical qubit to coherent and incoherent bit-flip errors on its constituent physical qubits. While increased physical qubit coherence times and shorter QED blocks are required to actively safeguard quantum information, this demonstration is a critical step toward larger codes based on multiple parity measurements.
A challenge for scaling up quantum processors using frequency-crowded, weakly anharmonic qubits is to drive individual qubits without causing leakage into non-computational levels ofthe others, while also minimizing the number of control lines. To address this, we implement single-qubit Wah-Wah control in a circuit QED processor with a single feedline for all transmon qubits, operating at the maximum gate speed achievable given the frequency crowding. Randomized benchmarking and quantum process tomography confirm alternating qubit control with ≤1 average error per computational step and decoherence-limited idling of one qubit while driving another with a Wah-Wah pulse train.
We present an indirect two-qubit parity meter in planar circuit quantum electrodynamics, realized by discrete interaction with an ancilla and a subsequent projective ancilla measurementwith a dedicated, dispersively coupled resonator. Quantum process tomography and successful entanglement by measurement demonstrate that the meter is intrinsically quantum non-demolition. Separate interaction and measurement steps allow commencing subsequent data qubit operations in parallel with ancilla measurement, offering time savings over continuous schemes.