Group-V materials such as niobium and tantalum have become popular choices for extending the performance of circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) platforms allowing for quantum processorsand memories with reduced error rates and more modes. The complex surface chemistry of niobium however makes identifying the main modes of decoherence difficult at millikelvin temperatures and single-photon powers. We use niobium coaxial quarter-wave cavities to study the impact of etch chemistry, prolonged atmospheric exposure, and the significance of cavity conditions prior to and during cooldown, in particular niobium hydride evolution, on single-photon coherence. We demonstrate cavities with quality factors of Qint≳1.4×109 in the single-photon regime, a 15 fold improvement over aluminum cavities of the same geometry. We rigorously quantify the sensitivity of our fabrication process to various loss mechanisms and demonstrate a 2−4× reduction in the two-level system (TLS) loss tangent and a 3−5× improvement in the residual resistivity over traditional BCP etching techniques. Finally, we demonstrate transmon integration and coherent cavity control while maintaining a cavity coherence of \SI{11.3}{ms}. The accessibility of our method, which can easily be replicated in academic-lab settings, and the demonstration of its performance mark an advancement in 3D cQED.
The performance of various superconducting devices operating at ultra-low temperatures is impaired by the presence of non-equilibrium quasiparticles. Inelastic quasiparticle (QP) tunnelingacross Josephson junctions in superconducting qubits results in decoherence and spurious excitations and, notably, can trigger correlated errors that severely impede quantum error correction. In this work, we use „gap engineering“ to suppress the tunneling of low-energy quasiparticles in Al-based transmon qubits, a leading building block for superconducting quantum processors. By implementing potential barriers for QP, we strongly suppress QP tunneling across the junction and preserve charge parity for over 103 seconds. The suppression of QP tunneling also results in a reduction in the qubit energy relaxation rates. The demonstrated approach to gap engineering can be easily implemented in all Al-based circuits with Josephson junctions.
Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum Computing (NISQ) has dominated headlines in recent years, with the longer-term vision of Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computation (FTQC) offering significantpotential albeit at currently intractable resource costs and quantum error correction (QEC) overheads. For problems of interest, FTQC will require millions of physical qubits with long coherence times, high-fidelity gates, and compact sizes to surpass classical systems. Just as heterogeneous specialization has offered scaling benefits in classical computing, it is likewise gaining interest in FTQC. However, systematic use of heterogeneity in either hardware or software elements of FTQC systems remains a serious challenge due to the vast design space and variable physical constraints.
This paper meets the challenge of making heterogeneous FTQC design practical by introducing HetArch, a toolbox for designing heterogeneous quantum systems, and using it to explore heterogeneous design scenarios. Using a hierarchical approach, we successively break quantum algorithms into smaller operations (akin to classical application kernels), thus greatly simplifying the design space and resulting tradeoffs. Specializing to superconducting systems, we then design optimized heterogeneous hardware composed of varied superconducting devices, abstracting physical constraints into design rules that enable devices to be assembled into standard cells optimized for specific operations. Finally, we provide a heterogeneous design space exploration framework which reduces the simulation burden by a factor of 10^4 or more and allows us to characterize optimal design points. We use these techniques to design superconducting quantum modules for entanglement distillation, error correction, and code teleportation, reducing error rates by 2.6x, 10.7x, and 3.0x compared to homogeneous systems.
Cavity quantum electrodynamics, which explores the granularity of light by coupling a resonator to a nonlinear emitter, has played a foundational role in the development of modern quantuminformation science and technology. In parallel, the field of condensed matter physics has been revolutionized by the discovery of underlying topological robustness in the face of disorder, often arising from the breaking of time-reversal symmetry, as in the case of the quantum Hall effect. In this work, we explore for the first time cavity quantum electrodynamics of a transmon qubit in the topological vacuum of a Harper-Hofstadter topological lattice. To achieve this, we assemble a square lattice of niobium superconducting resonators and break time-reversal symmetry by introducing ferrimagnets before coupling the system to a single transmon qubit. We spectroscopically resolve the individual bulk and edge modes of this lattice, detect vacuum-stimulated Rabi oscillations between the excited transmon and each mode, and thereby measure the synthetic-vacuum-induced Lamb shift of the transmon. Finally, we demonstrate the ability to employ the transmon to count individual photons within each mode of the topological band structure. This work opens the field of chiral quantum optics experiment, suggesting new routes to topological many-body physics and offering unique approaches to backscatter-resilient quantum communication.
Multimode cavity quantum electrodynamics —where a two level system interacts simultaneously with many cavity modes—provides a versatile framework for quantum informationprocessing and quantum optics. Due to the combination of long coherence times and large interaction strengths, one of the leading experimental platforms for cavity QED involves coupling a superconducting circuit to a 3D microwave cavity. In this work, we realize a 3D multimode circuit QED system with single photon lifetimes of 2 ms and cooperativities of 0.5−1.5×109 across 9 modes of a novel seamless cavity. We demonstrate a variety of protocols for universal single-mode quantum control applicable across all cavity modes, using only a single drive line. We achieve this by developing a straightforward flute method for creating monolithic superconducting microwave cavities that reduces loss while simultaneously allowing control of the mode spectrum and mode-qubit interaction. We highlight the flexibility and ease of implementation of this technique by using it to fabricate a variety of 3D cavity geometries, providing a template for engineering multimode quantum systems with exceptionally low dissipation. This work is an important step towards realizing hardware efficient random access quantum memories and processors, and for exploring quantum many-body physics with photons.
Interactions are essential for the creation of correlated quantum many-body states. While two-body interactions underlie most natural phenomena, three- and four-body interactions areimportant for the physics of nuclei [1], exotic few-body states in ultracold quantum gases [2], the fractional quantum Hall effect [3], quantum error correction [4], and holography [5, 6]. Recently, a number of artificial quantum systems have emerged as simulators for many-body physics, featuring the ability to engineer strong interactions. However, the interactions in these systems have largely been limited to the two-body paradigm, and require building up multi-body interactions by combining two-body forces. Here, we demonstrate a pure N-body interaction between microwave photons stored in an arbitrary number of electromagnetic modes of a multimode cavity. The system is dressed such that there is collectively no interaction until a target total photon number is reached across multiple distinct modes, at which point they interact strongly. The microwave cavity features 9 modes with photon lifetimes of ∼2 ms coupled to a superconducting transmon circuit, forming a multimode circuit QED system with single photon cooperativities of ∼109. We generate multimode interactions by using cavity photon number resolved drives on the transmon circuit to blockade any multiphoton state with a chosen total photon number distributed across the target modes. We harness the interaction for state preparation, preparing Fock states of increasing photon number via quantum optimal control pulses acting only on the cavity modes. We demonstrate multimode interactions by generating entanglement purely with uniform cavity drives and multimode photon blockade, and characterize the resulting two- and three-mode W states using a new protocol for multimode Wigner tomography.
The gravitational evidence for the existence of dark matter is extensive, yet thus far, dark matter has evaded direct detection in terrestrial experiments. Detection mechanisms forlow mass dark matter candidates such as the axion or hidden photon leverage potential interactions with electromagnetic fields, whereby the dark matter (of unknown mass) on rare occasion converts into a single photon. Current dark matter searches operating at microwave frequencies, use a resonant cavity to coherently accumulate the field sourced by the dark matter and use a quantum limited linear amplifier to read out the cavity signal. Here, we report the development of a novel microwave photon counting technique and use it to set a new exclusion limit on hidden photon dark matter. We constrain the kinetic mixing angle to ϵ≤1.82×10−15 in a narrow band around 6.011 GHz (24.86 μeV) with an integration time of 8.33 s. We operate a superconducting qubit to make repeated quantum non-demolition measurements of cavity photons and apply a hidden Markov model analysis to reduce the noise to 15.7 dB below the quantum limit, with performance limited by the residual population of the system. The techniques presented here will dramatically improve the sensitivity of future dark matter searches in the range of 3-30 GHz and are generally applicable to measurements that require high sensitivity to inherently low signal photon rates.
The extit{heavy-fluxonium} circuit is a promising building block for superconducting quantum processors due to its long relaxation and dephasing time at the half-flux frustrationpoint. However, the suppressed charge matrix elements and low transition frequency have made it challenging to perform fast single-qubit gates using standard protocols. We report on new protocols for reset, fast coherent control, and readout, that allow high-quality operation of the qubit with a 14 MHz transition frequency, an order of magnitude lower in energy than the ambient thermal energy scale. We utilize higher levels of the fluxonium to initialize the qubit with 97\% fidelity, corresponding to cooling it to 190 μK. We realize high-fidelity control using a universal set of single-cycle flux gates, which are comprised of directly synthesizable fast pulses, while plasmon-assisted readout is used for measurements. On a qubit with T1,T2e∼~300~μs, we realize single-qubit gates in 20−60~ns with an average gate fidelity of 99.8% as characterized by randomized benchmarking.
We autonomously stabilize arbitrary states of a qubit through parametric modulation of the coupling between a fixed frequency qubit and resonator. The coupling modulation is achievedwith a tunable coupler design, in which the qubit and the resonator are connected in parallel to a superconducting quantum interference device. This allows for quasi-static tuning of the qubit-cavity coupling strength from 12 MHz to more than 300 MHz. Additionally, the coupling can be dynamically modulated, allowing for single photon exchange in 6 ns. Qubit coherence times exceeding 20 μs are maintained over the majority of the range of tuning, limited primarily by the Purcell effect. The parametric stabilization technique realized using the tunable coupler involves engineering the qubit bath through a combination of photon non-conserving sideband interactions realized by flux modulation, and direct qubit Rabi driving. We demonstrate that the qubit can be stabilized to arbitrary states on the Bloch sphere with a worst-case fidelity exceeding 80 %.
We realize a Λ system in a superconducting circuit, with metastable states exhibiting lifetimes up to 7ms. We exponentially suppress the tunneling matrix elements involved in spontaneousenergy relaxation by creating a „heavy“ fluxonium, realized by adding a capacitive shunt to the original circuit design. The device allows for both cavity-assisted and direct fluorescent readout, as well as state preparation schemes akin to optical pumping. Since direct transitions between the metastable states are strongly suppressed, we utilize Raman transitions for coherent manipulation of the states.