We report the experimental realization of strong longitudinal (ZZ) coupling between two superconducting transmon qubits achieved solely through capacitive engineering. By systematicallyvarying the qubit frequency detuning, we measure cross-Kerr inter-qubit interaction strengths ranging from 10 MHz up to 350 MHz, more than an order of magnitude larger than previously observed in similar capacitively coupled systems. In this configuration, the qubits enter a strong-interaction regime in which the excitation of one qubit inhibits that of its neighbor, demonstrating a dynamical blockade mediated entirely by the engineered ZZ coupling. Circuit quantization simulations accurately reproduce the experimental results, while perturbative models confirm the theoretical origin of the energy shift as a hybridization between the computational states and higher-excitation manifolds. We establish a robust and scalable method to access interaction-dominated physics in superconducting circuits, providing a pathway towards solid-state implementations of globally controlled quantum architectures and cooperative many-body dynamics.
We study the impact of static disorder on a globally-controlled superconducting quantum computing architecture based on a quasi-two-dimensional ladder geometry [R. Menta et al., Phys.Rev. Research 7, L012065 (2025)]. Specifically, we examine how fabrication-induced inhomogeneities in qubit resonant frequencies and coupling strengths affect quantum state propagation and the fidelity of fundamental quantum operations. Using numerical simulations, we quantify the degradation in performance due to disorder and identify single-qubit rotations, two-qubit entangling gates, and quantum information transport as particularly susceptible. To address this challenge, we rely on pulse optimization schemes, and, in particular, on the GRAPE (Gradient Ascent Pulse Engineering) algorithm. Our results demonstrate that, even for realistic levels of disorder, optimized pulse sequences can achieve high-fidelity operations, exceeding 99.9% for the three quantum operations, restoring reliable universal quantum logic and robust information flow. These findings highlight pulse optimization as a powerful strategy to enhance the resilience to disorder of solid-state globally-driven quantum computing platforms.
The processing unit of a solid-state quantum computer consists in an array of coupled qubits, each locally driven with on-chip microwave lines that route carefully-engineered controlsignals to the qubits in order to perform logical operations. This approach to quantum computing comes with two major problems. On the one hand, it greatly hampers scalability towards fault-tolerant quantum computers, which are estimated to need a number of qubits — and, therefore driving lines — on the order of 106. On the other hand, these lines are a source of electromagnetic noise, exacerbating frequency crowding and crosstalk, while also contributing to power dissipation inside the dilution fridge. We here tackle these two overwhelming challenges by presenting a novel quantum processing unit (QPU) for a universal quantum computer which is globally (rather than locally) driven. Our QPU relies on a string of superconducting qubits with always-on ZZ interactions, enclosed into a closed geometry, which we dub „conveyor belt“. Strikingly, this architecture requires only (N) physical qubits to run a computation on N computational qubits, in contrast to previous (N2) proposals for global quantum computation. Additionally, universality is achieved via the implementation of single-qubit gates and a one-shot Toffoli gate. The ability to perform multi-qubit operations in a single step could vastly improve the fidelity and execution time of many algorithms.
We propose a platform for implementing a universal, globally driven quantum computer based on a 2D ladder hosting three different species of superconducting qubits. In stark contrastwith the existing literature, our scheme exploits the always-on longitudinal ZZ coupling. The latter, combined with specific driving frequencies, enables the reach of a blockade regime, which plays a pivotal role in the computing scheme.