Fast CZ gate in hybrid fluxonium-transmon systems with tunable couplers

  1. Peng Xu,
  2. Yunlong Wang,
  3. Yuechen Mu,
  4. Ling Jiang,
  5. Peng Zhao,
  6. Shengjun Wu,
  7. and Xiaohong Yan
Hybrid superconducting architectures combining different types of qubits offer a promising platform for exploiting their complementary advantages, yet high-fidelity entangling gates
remain challenging because of strong nonlinearities and residual qubit-qubit interactions. Here, we propose a high-fidelity controlled-Z (CZ) gate for a hybrid circuit comprising a fluxonium qubit, a fixed-frequency transmon qubit, and a flux-tunable transmon coupler. By modulating only the external magnetic flux applied to the coupler, the qubit-qubit interaction is dynamically engineered for conditional-phase accumulation while the residual interaction is suppressed at idle, mitigating spectator-induced errors. We employ a low-dimensional Fourier-cosine pulse parameterization and a physically motivated cost function to independently suppress conditional-phase errors and leakage from the computational subspace. Numerical simulations demonstrate that a microwave-free CZ gate can be realized within 25ns, with an average gate fidelity exceeding 99.99% and leakage below 10−5. Using experimentally relevant superconducting-qubit parameters and accounting for decoherence, the proposed scheme maintains a CZ-gate fidelity of approximately 99.9%. We further extend the analysis to larger coupled architectures and find that the CZ-gate infidelity remains below 10−4 in the presence of spectator qubits. These results establish single-parameter flux control as a simple and robust approach for realizing high-fidelity entangling gates in heterogeneous superconducting quantum architectures.

Microwave-activated two-qubit gates for fixed-coupling and fixed-frequency transmon qubits

  1. Ling Jiang,
  2. Peng Xu,
  3. Shengjun Wu,
  4. Jian-An Sun,
  5. and Fu-Quan Dou
All-microwave control of fixed-frequency superconducting quantum systems offers the potential to reduce control circuit complexity and increase system coherence. Nevertheless, due to
the limited control flexibility in qubit parameters, one has to address several issues, such as quantum crosstalk and frequency crowding, for scaling up qubit architecture with non-tunable elements. This study proposes a microwave-activated two-qubit gate scheme for two fixed-frequency transmon qubits coupled via a fixed-frequency transmon coupler. The protocol relies on applying a microwave pulse exclusively to the coupler, enabling the implementation of a controlled-Z (CZ) gate. We show that the gate fidelity exceeding 0.999 can be achieved within 150 ns, excluding decoherence effects. Moreover, we also show that leakage from the computational subspace to non-computational states can also be effectively suppressed.