Magnetic impurities are known to degrade superconductivity. For this reason, physical vapor deposition chambers that have previously been used for magnetic materials have generallybeen avoided for making high-quality superconducting resonator devices. In this article, we show by example that such chambers can be used: with Nb films sputtered in a chamber that continues to be used for magnetic materials, we demonstrate compact (3 {\mu}m gap) coplanar waveguide resonators with low-power internal quality factors near one million. We achieve this using a resist strip bath with no post-fabrication acid treatment, which results in performance comparable to previous strip baths with acid treatments. We also find evidence that this improved resist strip bath provides a better surface chemical template for post-fabrication hydrogen fluoride processing. These results are consistent across three Si substrate preparation methods, including a \SI{700}{\celsius} anneal.
Direct dipole coupling between a two-level system and a bosonic mode describes the interactions present in a wide range of physical platforms. In this work, we study a coupling thatis mixed between two pairs of quadratures of a bosonic mode and a spin. In this setting, we can suppress the dispersive shift while retaining a nonzero Kerr shift, which remarkably results in a cubic relationship between shot noise dephasing and thermal photons in the oscillator. We demonstrate this configuration with a simple toy model, quantify the expected improvements to photon shot-noise dephasing of the spin, and describe an approach to fast qubit readout via the Kerr shift. Further, we show how such a regime is achievable in superconducting circuits because magnetic and electric couplings can be of comparable strength, using two examples: the Cooper pair transistor and the fluxonium molecule.
Floquet engineering is a powerful method that can be used to modify the properties of interacting many-body Hamiltonians via the application of periodic time-dependent drives. Herewe consider the physics of an inductively shunted superconducting Josephson junction in the presence of Floquet drives in the fluxonium regime and beyond, which we dub the frozonium artificial atom. We find that in the vicinity of special ratios of the drive amplitude and frequency, the many-body dynamics can be tuned to that of an effectively linear bosonic oscillator, with additional nonlinear corrections that are suppressed in higher powers of the drive frequency. By analyzing the inverse participation ratios between the time-evolved frozonium wavefunctions and the eigenbasis of a linear oscillator, we demonstrate the ability to achieve a novel dynamical control using a combination of numerical exact diagonalization and Floquet-Magnus expansion. We discuss the physics of resonances between quasi-energy states induced by the drive, and ways to mitigate their effects. We also highlight the enhanced protection of frozonium against external sources of noise present in experimental setups. This work lays the foundation for future applications in quantum memory and bosonic quantum control using superconducting circuits.
Quantum computation will rely on quantum error correction to counteract decoherence. Successfully implementing an error correction protocol requires the fidelity of qubit operationsto be well-above error correction thresholds. In superconducting quantum computers, measurement of the qubit state remains the lowest-fidelity operation. For the transmon, a prototypical superconducting qubit, measurement is carried out by scattering a microwave tone off the qubit. Conventionally, the frequency of this tone is of the same order as the transmon frequency. The measurement fidelity in this approach is limited by multi-excitation resonances in the transmon spectrum which are activated at high readout power. These resonances excite the qubit outside of the computational basis, violating the desired quantum non-demolition character of the measurement. Here, we find that strongly detuning the readout frequency from that of the transmon exponentially suppresses the strength of spurious multi-excitation resonances. By increasing the readout frequency up to twelve times the transmon frequency, we achieve a quantum non-demolition measurement fidelity of 99.93% with a residual probability of leakage to non-computational states of only 0.02%.
The density of quasiparticles typically observed in superconducting qubits exceeds the value expected in equilibrium by many orders of magnitude. Can this out-of-equilibrium quasiparticledensity still possess an energy distribution in equilibrium with the phonon bath? Here, we answer this question affirmatively by measuring the thermal activation of charge-parity switching in a transmon qubit with a difference in superconducting gap on the two sides of the Josephson junction. We then demonstrate how the gap asymmetry of the device can be exploited to manipulate its parity.
Single-charge tunneling is a decoherence mechanism affecting superconducting qubits, yet the origin of excess quasiparticle excitations (QPs) responsible for this tunneling in superconductingdevices is not fully understood. We measure the flux dependence of charge-parity (or simply, „parity“) switching in an offset-charge-sensitive transmon qubit to identify the contributions of photon-assisted parity switching and QP generation to the overall parity-switching rate. The parity-switching rate exhibits a qubit-state-dependent peak in the flux dependence, indicating a cold distribution of excess QPs which are predominantly trapped in the low-gap film of the device. Moreover, we find that the photon-assisted process contributes significantly to both parity switching and the generation of excess QPs by fitting to a model that self-consistently incorporates photon-assisted parity switching as well as inter-film QP dynamics.
We introduce Weyl Josephson circuits: small Josephson junction circuits that simulate Weyl band structures. We first formulate a general approach to design circuits that are analogousto Bloch Hamiltonians of a desired dimensionality and symmetry class. We then construct and analyze a six-junction device that produces a 3D Weyl Hamiltonian with broken inversion symmetry and in which topological phase transitions can be triggered \emph{in situ}. We argue that currently available superconducting circuit technology allows experiments that probe topological properties inaccessible in condensed matter systems.