Sébastien Jezouin

Quantum control of a cat-qubit with bit-flip times exceeding ten seconds

  1. Ulysse Réglade,
  2. Adrien Bocquet,
  3. Ronan Gautier,
  4. Antoine Marquet,
  5. Emanuele Albertinale,
  6. Natalia Pankratova,
  7. Mattis Hallén,
  8. Felix Rautschke,
  9. Lev-Arcady Sellem,
  10. Pierre Rouchon,
  11. Alain Sarlette,
  12. Mazyar Mirrahimi,
  13. Philippe Campagne-Ibarcq,
  14. Raphaël Lescanne,
  15. Sébastien Jezouin,
  16. and Zaki Leghtas
Binary classical information is routinely encoded in the two metastable states of a dynamical system. Since these states may exhibit macroscopic lifetimes, the encoded information inherits
a strong protection against bit-flips. A recent qubit – the cat-qubit – is encoded in the manifold of metastable states of a quantum dynamical system, thereby acquiring bit-flip protection. An outstanding challenge is to gain quantum control over such a system without breaking its protection. If this challenge is met, significant shortcuts in hardware overhead are forecast for quantum computing. In this experiment, we implement a cat-qubit with bit-flip times exceeding ten seconds. This is a four order of magnitude improvement over previous cat-qubit implementations, and six orders of magnitude enhancement over the single photon lifetime that compose this dynamical qubit. This was achieved by introducing a quantum tomography protocol that does not break bit-flip protection. We prepare and image quantum superposition states, and measure phase-flip times above 490 nanoseconds. Most importantly, we control the phase of these superpositions while maintaining the bit-flip time above ten seconds. This work demonstrates quantum operations that preserve macroscopic bit-flip times, a necessary step to scale these dynamical qubits into fully protected hardware-efficient architectures.
arxiv pdf

Autoparametric resonance extending the bit-flip time of a cat qubit up to 0.3 s

  1. Antoine Marquet,
  2. Antoine Essig,
  3. Joachim Cohen,
  4. Nathanaël Cottet,
  5. Anil Murani,
  6. Emanuele Abertinale,
  7. Simon Dupouy,
  8. Audrey Bienfait,
  9. Théau Peronnin,
  10. Sébastien Jezouin,
  11. Raphaël Lescanne,
  12. and Benjamin Huard
Cat qubits, for which logical |0⟩ and |1⟩ are coherent states |±α⟩ of a harmonic mode, offer a promising route towards quantum error correction. Using dissipation to our advantage
so that photon pairs of the harmonic mode are exchanged with single photons of its environment, it is possible to stabilize the logical states and exponentially increase the bit-flip time of the cat qubit with the photon number |α|2. Large two-photon dissipation rate κ2 ensures fast qubit manipulation and short error correction cycles, which are instrumental to correct the remaining phase-flip errors in a repetition code of cat qubits. Here we introduce and operate an autoparametric superconducting circuit that couples a mode containing the cat qubit to a lossy mode whose frequency is set at twice that of the cat mode. This passive coupling does not require a parametric pump and reaches a rate κ2/2π≈2 MHz. With such a strong two-photon dissipation, bit-flip errors of the autoparametric cat qubit are prevented for a characteristic time up to 0.3 s with only a mild impact on phase-flip errors. Besides, we illustrate how the phase of a quantum superposition between |α⟩ and |−α⟩ can be arbitrarily changed by driving the harmonic mode while keeping the engineered dissipation active.
arxiv pdf