A periodically-driven superconducting nonlinear resonator can implement a Kerr-cat qubit, which provides a promising route to a quantum computer with a long lifetime. However, the systemis vulnerable to pure dephasing, which causes unwanted excitations outside the qubit subspace. Therefore, we require a refrigeration technology which confines the system in the qubit subspace. We theoretically study on-chip refrigeration for Kerr-cat qubits based on photon-assisted electron tunneling at tunneling junctions, called quantum circuit refrigerator (QCR). Rates of QCR-induced deexcitations of the system can be changed by more than four orders of magnitude by tuning a bias voltage across the tunneling junctions. Unwanted QCR-induced bit flips are greatly suppressed due to quantum interference in the tunneling process, and thus the long lifetime is preserved. The QCR can serve as a tunable dissipation source which stabilizes Kerr-cat qubits.
Kerr-cat qubits are a promising candidate for fault-tolerant quantum computers owing to the biased nature of errors. The ZZ coupling between the qubits can be utilized for a two-qubitentangling gate, but the residual coupling causes unnecessary always-on gates and crosstalk. In order to resolve this problem, we propose a tunable ZZ-coupling scheme using two transmon couplers. By setting the detunings of the two couplers at opposite values, the residual ZZ couplings via the two couplers cancel each other out. We also apply our scheme to the Rzz(Θ) gate (ZZ rotation with angle Θ), one of the two-qubit entangling gates. We numerically show that the fidelity of the Rzz(−π/2) gate is higher than 99.9% in a case of 16 ns gate time and without decoherence.
Pumped at approximately twice the natural frequency, a Josephson parametric oscillator called parametron or Kerr parametric oscillator shows self-oscillation. Quantum annealing anduniversal quantum computation using self-oscillating parametrons as qubits were proposed. However, controls of parametrons under the pump field are degraded by unwanted rapidly oscillating terms in the Hamiltonian, which is called counter rotating terms (CRTs) coming from the violation of the rotating wave approximation. Therefore, the pump field can be an intrinsic origin of the imperfection of controls of parameterons. Here, we theoretically study the effect of the CRTs on the accuracy of controls of a parametron: creation of a cat state and a single qubit gate along the x axis. It is shown that there is a trade-off relationship between the suppression of the nonadiabatic transitions and the validity of the rotating wave approximation in a conventional approach. We show that the tailored time dependence of the detuning of the pump field can suppress both of the nonadiabatic transitions and the disturbance of the state of the parametron due to the CRTs.
A Josephson quantum filter (JQF) protects a data qubit (DQ) from the radiative decay into transmission lines in superconducting quantum computing architectures. A transmon, which isa weakly nonlinear harmonic oscillator rather than a pure two-level system, can play a role of a JQF or a DQ. However, in the previous study, a JQF and a DQ were modeled as two-level systems neglecting the effects of higher levels. We theoretically examine the effects of the higher levels of the JQF and the DQ on the control of the DQ. It is shown that the higher levels of the DQ cause the shift of the resonance frequency and the decrease of the maximum population of the first excited state of the DQ in the controls with a continuous wave (cw) field and a pulsed field, while the higher levels of the JQF do not. Moreover, we present optimal parameters of the pulsed field, which maximize the control efficiency.
We demonstrate fast two-qubit gates using a parity-violated superconducting qubit consisting of a capacitively-shunted asymmetric Josephson-junction loop under a finite magnetic fluxbias. The second-order nonlinearity manifesting in the qubit enables the interaction with a neighboring single-junction transmon qubit via first-order inter-qubit sideband transitions with Rabi frequencies up to 30~MHz. Simultaneously, the unwanted static longitudinal~(ZZ) interaction is eliminated with ac Stark shifts induced by a continuous microwave drive near-resonant to the sideband transitions. The average fidelities of the two-qubit gates are evaluated with randomized benchmarking as 0.967, 0.951, 0.956 for CZ, iSWAP and SWAP gates, respectively.
We report on fast tunability of an electromagnetic environment coupled to a superconducting coplanar waveguide resonator. Namely, we utilize a recently-developed quantum-circuit refrigerator(QCR) to experimentally demonstrate a dynamic tunability in the total damping rate of the resonator up to almost two orders of magnitude. Based on the theory it corresponds to a change in the internal damping rate by nearly four orders of magnitude. The control of the QCR is fully electrical, with the shortest implemented operation times in the range of 10 ns. This experiment constitutes a fast active reset of a superconducting quantum circuit. In the future, a similar scheme can potentially be used to initialize superconducting quantum bits.