Multi-spin interactions can be engineered with artificial quantum spins. However, it is challenging to verify such interactions experimentally. Here we describe two methods to characterizethe n-local coupling of n spins. First, we analyze the variation of the transition energy of the static system as a function of local spin fields. Standard measurement techniques are employed to distinguish n-local interactions between up to five spins from lower-order contributions in the presence of noise and spurious fields and couplings. Second, we show a detection technique that relies on time dependent driving of the coupling term. Generalizations to larger system sizes are analyzed for both static and dynamic detection methods, and we find that the dynamic method is asymptotically optimal when increasing the system size. The proposed methods enable robust exploration of multi-spin interactions across a broad range of both coupling strengths and qubit modalities.
We consider mediated interactions in an array of floating transmons, where each qubit capacitor consists of two superconducting pads galvanically isolated from ground. Each such paircontributes two quantum degrees of freedom, one of which is used as a qubit, while the other remains fixed. However, these extraneous modes can generate coupling between the qubit modes that extends beyond the nearest neighbor. We present a general formalism describing the formation of this coupling and calculate it for a one-dimensional chain of transmons. We show that the strength of coupling and its range (that is, the exponential falloff) can be tuned independently via circuit design to realize a continuum from nearest-neighbor-only interactions to interactions that extend across the length of the chain. We present designs with capacitance and microwave simulations showing that various interaction configurations can be achieved in realistic circuits. Such coupling could be used in analog simulation of different quantum regimes or to increase connectivity in digital quantum systems. Thus mechanism must also be taken into account in other types of qubits with extraneous modes.
Dielectrics with low loss at microwave frequencies are imperative for high-coherence solid-state quantum computing platforms. We study the dielectric loss of hexagonal boron nitride(hBN) thin films in the microwave regime by measuring the quality factor of parallel-plate capacitors (PPCs) made of NbSe2-hBN-NbSe2 heterostructures integrated into superconducting circuits. The extracted microwave loss tangent of hBN is bounded to be at most in the mid-10-6 range in the low temperature, single-photon regime. We integrate hBN PPCs with aluminum Josephson junctions to realize transmon qubits with coherence times reaching 25 μs, consistent with the hBN loss tangent inferred from resonator measurements. The hBN PPC reduces the qubit feature size by approximately two-orders of magnitude compared to conventional all-aluminum coplanar transmons. Our results establish hBN as a promising dielectric for building high-coherence quantum circuits with substantially reduced footprint and, with a high energy participation that helps to reduce unwanted qubit cross-talk.
Particle transport and localization phenomena in condensed-matter systems can be modeled using a tight-binding lattice Hamiltonian. The ideal experimental emulation of such a modelutilizes simultaneous, high-fidelity control and readout of each lattice site in a highly coherent quantum system. Here, we experimentally study quantum transport in one-dimensional and two-dimensional tight-binding lattices, emulated by a fully controllable 3×3 array of superconducting qubits. We probe the propagation of entanglement throughout the lattice and extract the degree of localization in the Anderson and Wannier-Stark regimes in the presence of site-tunable disorder strengths and gradients. Our results are in quantitative agreement with numerical simulations and match theoretical predictions based on the tight-binding model. The demonstrated level of experimental control and accuracy in extracting the system observables of interest will enable the exploration of larger, interacting lattices where numerical simulations become intractable.
We introduce CircuitQ, an open-source toolbox for the analysis of superconducting circuits implemented in Python. It features the automated construction of a symbolic Hamiltonian ofthe input circuit, as well as a dynamic numerical representation of this Hamiltonian with a variable basis choice. Additional features include the estimation of the T1 lifetimes of the circuit states under various noise mechanisms. We review previously established circuit quantization methods and formulate them in a way that facilitates the software implementation. The toolbox is then showcased by applying it to practically relevant qubit circuits and comparing it to specialized circuit solvers. Our circuit quantization is both applicable to circuit inputs from a large design space and the software is open-sourced. We thereby add an important toolbox for the design of new quantum circuits for quantum information processing applications.
As progress is made towards the first generation of error-corrected quantum computers, careful characterization of a processor’s noise environment will be crucial to designingtailored, low-overhead error correction protocols. While standard coherence metrics and characterization protocols such as T1 and T2, process tomography, and randomized benchmarking are now ubiquitous, these techniques provide only partial information about the dynamic multi-qubit loss channels responsible for processor errors, which can be described more fully by a Lindblad operator in the master equation formalism. Here, we introduce and experimentally demonstrate Lindblad Tomography, a hardware-agnostic characterization protocol for tomographically reconstructing the Hamiltonian and Lindblad operators of a quantum channel from an ensemble of time-domain measurements. Performing Lindblad Tomography on a small superconducting quantum processor, we show that this technique characterizes and accounts for state-preparation and measurement (SPAM) errors and allows one to place strong bounds on the degree of non-Markovianity in the channels of interest. Comparing the results of single- and two-qubit measurements on a superconducting quantum processor, we demonstrate that Lindblad Tomography can also be used to identify and quantify sources of crosstalk on quantum processors, such as the presence of always-on qubit-qubit interactions.
Superconducting qubits are a promising platform for building a larger-scale quantum processor capable of solving otherwise intractable problems. In order for the processor to reachpractical viability, the gate errors need to be further suppressed and remain stable for extended periods of time. With recent advances in qubit control, both single- and two-qubit gate fidelities are now in many cases limited by the coherence times of the qubits. Here we experimentally employ closed-loop feedback to stabilize the frequency fluctuations of a superconducting transmon qubit, thereby increasing its coherence time by 26\% and reducing the single-qubit error rate from (8.5±2.1)×10−4 to (5.9±0.7)×10−4. Importantly, the resulting high-fidelity operation remains effective even away from the qubit flux-noise insensitive point, significantly increasing the frequency bandwidth over which the qubit can be operated with high fidelity. This approach is helpful in large qubit grids, where frequency crowding and parasitic interactions between the qubits limit their performance.
Increasing circuit complexity within quantum systems based on superconducting qubits necessitates high connectivity while retaining qubit coherence. Classical micro-electronic systemshave addressed interconnect density challenges by using 3D integration with interposers containing through-silicon vias (TSVs), but extending these integration techniques to superconducting quantum systems is challenging. Here, we discuss our approach for realizing high-aspect-ratio superconducting TSVs\textemdash 10 μm wide by 20 μm long by 200 μm deep\textemdash with densities of 100 electrically isolated TSVs per square millimeter. We characterize the DC and microwave performance of superconducting TSVs at cryogenic temperatures and demonstrate superconducting critical currents greater than 20 mA. These high-aspect-ratio, high critical current superconducting TSVs will enable high-density vertical signal routing within superconducting quantum processors.
Demonstrating the quantum computational advantage will require high-fidelity control and readout of multi-qubit systems. As system size increases, multiplexed qubit readout becomesa practical necessity to limit the growth of resource overhead. Many contemporary qubit-state discriminators presume single-qubit operating conditions or require considerable computational effort, limiting their potential extensibility. Here, we present multi-qubit readout using neural networks as state discriminators. We compare our approach to contemporary methods employed on a quantum device with five superconducting qubits and frequency-multiplexed readout. We find that fully-connected feedforward neural networks increase the qubit-state-assignment fidelity for our system. Relative to contemporary discriminators, the assignment error rate is reduced by up to 25 % due to the compensation of system-dependent nonidealities such as readout crosstalk which is reduced by up to one order of magnitude. Our work demonstrates a potentially extensible building block for high-fidelity readout relevant to both near-term devices and future fault-tolerant systems.
Interacting many-body quantum systems show a rich array of physical phenomena and dynamical properties, but are notoriously difficult to study: they are challenging analytically andexponentially difficult to simulate on classical computers. Small-scale quantum information processors hold the promise to efficiently emulate these systems, but characterizing their dynamics is experimentally challenging, requiring probes beyond simple correlation functions and multi-body tomographic methods. Here, we demonstrate the measurement of out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs), one of the most effective tools for studying quantum system evolution and processes like quantum thermalization. We implement a 3×3 two-dimensional hard-core Bose-Hubbard lattice with a superconducting circuit, study its time-reversibility by performing a Loschmidt echo, and measure OTOCs that enable us to observe the propagation of quantum information. A central requirement for our experiments is the ability to coherently reverse time evolution, which we achieve with a digital-analog simulation scheme. In the presence of frequency disorder, we observe that localization can partially be overcome with more particles present, a possible signature of many-body localization in two dimensions.