Krypton-sputtered tantalum films for scalable high-performance quantum devices

  1. Maciej W. Olszewski,
  2. Lingda Kong,
  3. Simon Reinhardt,
  4. Daniel Tong,
  5. Xinyi Du,
  6. Gabriele Di Gianluca,
  7. Haoran Lu,
  8. Saswata Roy,
  9. Luojia Zhang,
  10. Aleksandra B. Biedron,
  11. David A. Muller,
  12. and Valla Fatemi
Superconducting qubits based on tantalum (Ta) thin films have demonstrated the highest-performing microwave resonators and qubits. This makes Ta an attractive material for superconducting
quantum computing applications, but, so far, direct deposition has largely relied on high substrate temperatures exceeding \SI{400}{\celsius} to achieve the body-centered cubic phase, BCC (\textalpha-Ta). This leads to compatibility issues for scalable fabrication leveraging standard semiconductor fabrication lines. Here, we show that changing the sputter gas from argon (Ar) to krypton (Kr) promotes BCC Ta synthesis on silicon (Si) at temperatures as low as \SI{200}{\celsius}, providing a wide process window compatible with back-end-of-the-line fabrication standards. Furthermore, we find these films to have substantially higher electronic conductivity, consistent with clean-limit superconductivity. We validated the microwave performance through coplanar waveguide resonator measurements, finding that films deposited at \SI{250}{\celsius} and \SI{350}{\celsius} exhibit a tight performance distribution at the state of the art. Higher temperature-grown films exhibit higher losses, in correlation with the degree of Ta/Si intermixing revealed by cross-sectional transmission electron microscopy. Finally, with these films, we demonstrate transmon qubits with a relatively compact, \SI{20}{\micro\meter} capacitor gap, achieving a median quality factor up to 14 million.

Frozonium: Freezing Anharmonicity in Floquet Superconducting Circuits

  1. Keiran Lewellen,
  2. Rohit Mukherjee,
  3. Haoyu Guo,
  4. Saswata Roy,
  5. Valla Fatemi,
  6. and Debanjan Chowdhury
Floquet engineering is a powerful method that can be used to modify the properties of interacting many-body Hamiltonians via the application of periodic time-dependent drives. Here
we consider the physics of an inductively shunted superconducting Josephson junction in the presence of Floquet drives in the fluxonium regime and beyond, which we dub the frozonium artificial atom. We find that in the vicinity of special ratios of the drive amplitude and frequency, the many-body dynamics can be tuned to that of an effectively linear bosonic oscillator, with additional nonlinear corrections that are suppressed in higher powers of the drive frequency. By analyzing the inverse participation ratios between the time-evolved frozonium wavefunctions and the eigenbasis of a linear oscillator, we demonstrate the ability to achieve a novel dynamical control using a combination of numerical exact diagonalization and Floquet-Magnus expansion. We discuss the physics of resonances between quasi-energy states induced by the drive, and ways to mitigate their effects. We also highlight the enhanced protection of frozonium against external sources of noise present in experimental setups. This work lays the foundation for future applications in quantum memory and bosonic quantum control using superconducting circuits.