Accurate control of qubits is the central requirement for building functional quantum processors. For the current superconducting quantum processor, high-fidelity control of qubitsis mainly based on independently calibrated microwave pulses, which could differ from each other in frequencies, amplitudes, and phases. With this control strategy, the needed physical source could be challenging, especially when scaling up to large-scale quantum processors is considered. Inspired by Kane’s proposal for spin-based quantum computing, here, we explore theoretically the possibility of baseband flux control of superconducting qubits with only shared and always-on microwave drives. In our strategy, qubits are by default far detuned from the drive during system idle periods, qubit readout and baseband flux-controlled two-qubit gates can thus be realized with minimal impacts from the always-on drive. By contrast, during working periods, qubits are tuned on resonance with the drive and single-qubit gates can be realized. Therefore, universal qubit control can be achieved with only baseband flux pulses and always-on shared microwave drives. We apply this strategy to the qubit architecture where tunable qubits are coupled via a tunable coupler, and the analysis shows that high-fidelity qubit control is possible. Besides, the baseband control strategy needs fewer physical resources, such as control electronics and cooling power in cryogenic systems, than that of microwave control. More importantly, the flexibility of baseband flux control could be employed for addressing the non-uniformity issue of superconducting qubits, potentially allowing the realization of multiplexing and cross-bar technologies and thus controlling large numbers of qubits with fewer control lines. We thus expect that baseband control with shared microwave drives can help build large-scale superconducting quantum processors.
Maintaining or even improving gate performance with growing numbers of parallel controlled qubits is a vital requirement towards fault-tolerant quantum computing. For superconductingquantum processors, though isolated one- or two-qubit gates have been demonstrated with high-fidelity, implementing these gates in parallel commonly show worse performance. Generally, this degradation is attributed to various crosstalks between qubits, such as quantum crosstalk due to residual inter-qubit coupling. An understanding of the exact nature of these crosstalks is critical to figuring out respective mitigation schemes and improved qubit architecture designs with low crosstalk. Here we give a theoretical analysis of quantum crosstalk impact on simultaneous gate operations in a qubit architecture, where fixed-frequency transmon qubits are coupled via a tunable bus, and sub-100-ns controlled-Z (CZ) gates can be realized by applying a baseband flux pulse on the bus. Our analysis shows that for microwave-driven single qubit gates, the dressing from qubit-qubit coupling can cause non-negligible cross-driving errors when qubits operate near frequency collision regions. During CZ gate operations, although unwanted near-neighbor interactions are nominally turned off, sub-MHz parasitic next-near-neighbor interactions involving spectator qubits can still exist, causing considerable leakage or control error when one operates qubit systems around these parasitic resonance points. To ensure high-fidelity simultaneous operations, this could rise a request to figure out a better way to balance the gate error from target qubit systems themselves and the error from non-participating spectator qubits. Overall, our analysis suggests that towards useful quantum processors, the qubit architecture should be examined carefully in the context of high-fidelity simultaneous gate operations in a scalable qubit lattice.
The superconducting transmon qubit is currently a leading qubit modality for quantum computing, but gate performance in quantum processor with transmons is often insufficient to supportrunning complex algorithms for practical applications. It is thus highly desirable to further improve gate performance. Due to the weak anharmonicity of transmon, a static ZZ interaction between coupled transmons commonly exists, undermining the gate performance, and in long term, it can become performance limiting. Here we theoretically explore a previously unexplored parameter region in an all-transmon system to address this issue. We show that an experimentally feasible parameter region, where the ZZ interaction is heavily suppressed while leaving XY interaction with an adequate strength to implement two-qubit gates, can be found in an all-transmon system. Thus, two-qubit gates, such as cross-resonance gate or iSWAP gate, can be realized without the detrimental effect from static ZZ interaction. To illustrate this, we show that an iSWAP gate with fast gate speed and dramatically lower conditional phase error can be achieved. Scaling up to large-scale transmon quantum processor, especially the cases with fixed coupling, addressing error, idling error, and crosstalk that arises from static ZZ interaction could also be heavily suppressed.
For building a scalable quantum processor with superconducting qubits, the ZZ interaction is of great concert because of relevant for implementing two-qubit gates, and the close contactbetween gate infidelity and its residual. Two-qubit gates with fidelity beyond fault-tolerant thresholds have been demonstrated using the ZZ interaction. However, as the performance of quantum processor improves, the residual static-ZZ can also become a performance-limiting factor for quantum gate operations and quantum error correction. Here, we introduce a scalable superconducting architecture for addressing this challenge. We demonstrate that by coupling two superconducting qubits with opposite-sign anharmonicities together, high-contrast ZZ interaction can be realized in this architecture. Thus, we can control ZZ interaction with high on/off ratio for implementing two-qubit CZ gate, or suppress it during the two-qubit gate operations using XY interaction (e.g. iSWAP). Meanwhile, the ZZ crosstalk related to neighboring spectator qubits can also be heavily suppressed in fixed coupled multi-qubit systems. This architecture could provide a promising way towards scalable superconducting quantum processor with high gate fidelity and low qubit crosstalk.
We propose a realizable circuit QED architecture for engineering states of a superconducting resonator off-resonantly coupled to an ancillary superconducting qubit. The qubit-resonatordispersive interaction together with a microwave drive applied to the qubit gives rise to a Kerr resonator with two-photon driving that enables us to efficiently engineer the quantum state of the resonator such as generation of the Schrodinger cat states for resonator-based universal quantum computation. Moreover, the presented architecture is easily scalable for solving optimization problem mapped into the Ising spin glass model, and thus served as a platform for quantum annealing. Although various scalable architecture with superconducting qubits have been proposed for realizing quantum annealer, the existing annealers are currently limited to the coherent time of the qubits. Here, based on the protocol for realizing two-photon driven Kerr resonator in three-dimensional circuit QED (3D cQED), we propose a flexible and scalable hardware for implementing quantum annealer that combines the advantage of the long coherence times attainable in 3D cQED and the recently proposed resonator based Lechner-Hauke-Zoller (LHZ) scheme. In the proposed resonator based LHZ annealer, each spin is encoded in the subspace formed by two coherent state of 3D microwave superconducting resonator with opposite phase, and thus the fully-connected Ising model is mapped onto the network of the resonator with local tunable three-resonator interaction. This hardware architecture provides a promising physical platform for realizing quantum annealer with improved coherence.
We analyze a measurement scheme that allows determination of the Berry curvature and the topological Chern number of a Hamiltonian with parameters exploring a two-dimensional closedmanifold. Our method uses continuous monitoring of the gradient of the Hamiltonian with respect to one parameter during a single quasi-adiabatic quench of the other. Measurement back-action leads to disturbance of the system dynamics, but we show that this can be compensated by a feedback Hamiltonian. As an example, we analyze the implementation with a superconducting qubit subject to time varying, near resonant microwave fields; equivalent to a spin 1/2 particle in a magnetic field.
We propose a scheme to realize controllable quantum state transfer and entanglement generation among transmon qubits in the typical circuit QED setup based on adiabatic passage. Throughdesigning the time-dependent driven pulses applied on the transmon qubits, we find that fast quantum sate transfer can be achieved between arbitrary two qubits and quantum entanglement among the qubits also can also be engineered. Furthermore, we numerically analyzed the influence of the decoherence on our scheme with the current experimental accessible systematical parameters. The result shows that our scheme is very robust against both the cavity decay and qubit relaxation, the fidelities of the state transfer and entanglement preparation process could be very high. In addition, our scheme is also shown to be insensitive to the inhomogeneous of qubit-resonator coupling strengths.
We propose an experimental scheme to simulate the dynamical quantum Hall effect and the related interaction-induced topological transition with a superconducting-qubit array. We showthat a one-dimensional Heisenberg model with tunable parameters can be realized in an array of superconducting qubits. The quantized plateaus, which is a feature of the dynamical quantum Hall effect, will emerge in the Berry curvature of the superconducting qubits as a function of the coupling strength between nearest neighbor qubits. We numerically calculate the Berry curvatures of two-, four- and six-qubit arrays, and find that the interaction-induced topological transition can be easily observed with the simplest two-qubit array. Furthermore, we analyze some practical conditions in typical experiments for observing such dynamical quantum Hall effect