Coupler-Assisted Leakage Reduction for Scalable Quantum Error Correction with Superconducting Qubits

  1. Xiaohan Yang,
  2. Ji Chu,
  3. Zechen Guo,
  4. Wenhui Huang,
  5. Yongqi Liang,
  6. Jiawei Liu,
  7. Jiawei Qiu,
  8. Xuandong Sun,
  9. Ziyu Tao,
  10. Jiawei Zhang,
  11. Jiajian Zhang,
  12. Libo Zhang,
  13. Yuxuan Zhou,
  14. Weijie Guo,
  15. Ling Hu,
  16. Ji Jiang,
  17. Yang Liu,
  18. Xiayu Linpeng,
  19. Tingyong Chen,
  20. Yuanzhen Chen,
  21. Jingjing Niu,
  22. Song Liu,
  23. Youpeng Zhong,
  24. and Dapeng Yu
Superconducting qubits are a promising platform for building fault-tolerant quantum computers, with recent achievement showing the suppression of logical error with increasing code
size. However, leakage into non-computational states, a common issue in practical quantum systems including superconducting circuits, introduces correlated errors that undermine QEC scalability. Here, we propose and demonstrate a leakage reduction scheme utilizing tunable couplers, a widely adopted ingredient in large-scale superconducting quantum processors. Leveraging the strong frequency tunability of the couplers and stray interaction between the couplers and readout resonators, we eliminate state leakage on the couplers, thus suppressing space-correlated errors caused by population propagation among the couplers. Assisted by the couplers, we further reduce leakage to higher qubit levels with high efficiency (98.1%) and low error rate on the computational subspace (0.58%), suppressing time-correlated errors during QEC cycles. The performance of our scheme demonstrates its potential as an indispensable building block for scalable QEC with superconducting qubits.

Energetic cost of measurements using quantum, coherent, and thermal light

  1. Xiayu Linpeng,
  2. Léa Bresque,
  3. Maria Maffei,
  4. Andrew N. Jordan,
  5. 4 Alexia Auffèves,
  6. and Kater W. Murch
Quantum measurements are basic operations that play a critical role in the study and application of quantum information. We study how the use of quantum, coherent, and classical thermal
states of light in a circuit quantum electrodynamics setup impacts the performance of quantum measurements, by comparing their respective measurement backaction and measurement signal to noise ratio per photon. In the strong dispersive limit, we find that thermal light is capable of performing quantum measurements with comparable efficiency to coherent light, both being outperformed by single-photon light. We then analyze the thermodynamic cost of each measurement scheme. We show that single-photon light shows an advantage in terms of energy cost per information gain, reaching the fundamental thermodynamic cost.