Kerr-cat qubits realized in periodically driven superconducting nonlinear resonators are a promising platform for quantum information processing with biased noise. Pure dephasing insuch systems induces leakage out of the qubit subspace, motivating the use of quantum circuit refrigeration (QCR) to remove excess excitations. While conventional superconductor–insulator–normal-metal–insulator–superconductor (SINIS)-based QCRs can suppress leakage via single-photon absorption, they also enhance QCR-induced phase-flip errors. Here we investigate a QCR based on a superconductor–insulator–superconductor–insulator–superconductor (SISIS) junction coupled to a Kerr parametric oscillator (KPO). We show that a SISIS-based QCR can operate in a regime where single-photon processes are suppressed while two-photon absorption dominates. As a result, the proposed SISIS-based QCR achieves strong suppression of dephasing-induced leakage while substantially reducing the increase in phase-flip errors associated with QCR operation. These results demonstrate that the proposed SISIS-based QCR provides an effective approach for mitigating leakage while limiting QCR-induced phase-flip errors in Kerr-cat qubits.
Recent advancements in circuit quantum electrodynamics have enabled precise manipulation and detection of the single energy quantum in quantum systems. A quantum circuit refrigerator(QCR) is capable of electrically cooling the excited population of quantum systems, such as superconducting resonators and qubits, through photon-assisted tunneling of quasi-particles within a superconductor-insulator-normal metal junction. In this study, we demonstrated instantaneous QCR in the quantum regime. We performed the time-resolved measurement of the QCR-induced cooling of photon number inside the superconducting resonator by harnessing a qubit as a photon detector. From the enhanced photon loss rate of the resonator estimated from the amount of the AC Stark shift, the QCR was shown to have a cooling power of approximately 300 aW. Furthermore, even below the single energy quantum, the QCR can reduce the number of photons inside the resonator with 100 ns pulse from thermal equilibrium. Numerical calculations based on the Lindblad master equation successfully reproduced these experimental results.
The initialization of superconducting qubits is one of the essential techniques for the realization of quantum computation. In previous research, initialization above 99% fidelityhas been achieved at 280 ns. Here, we demonstrate the rapid initialization of a superconducting qubit with a quantum-circuit refrigerator (QCR). Photon-assisted tunneling of quasiparticles in the QCR can temporally increase the relaxation time of photons inside the resonator and helps release energy from the qubit to the environment. Experiments using this protocol have shown that 99\% of initialization time is reduced to 180 ns. This initialization time depends strongly on the relaxation rate of the resonator, and faster initialization is possible by reducing the resistance of the QCR, which limits the ON/OFF ratio, and by strengthening the coupling between the QCR and the resonator.