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arXiv:1502.03340 · Physical Review A

Scalable two- and four-qubit parity measurement with a threshold photon counter

Luke C. G. Govia, Emily Pritchett, B. L. T. Plourde, Maxim Vavilov, R. McDermott, Frank K. Wilhelm

Published Aug 14, 2015• 13 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Parity measurement is a central tool for many quantum information processing tasks. In this work, we propose a method to directly measure two- and four-qubit parity with low overhead in hardware and software while remaining robust to experimental imperfections. Our scheme relies on dispersive qubit-cavity coupling and photon counting that is sensitive only to intensity; both ingredients are widely realized in many different quantum computing modalities. For a leading technology in quantum computing, superconducting integrated circuits, we analyze the measurement contrast and the back action of the scheme and show that this measurement comes close enough to an ideal parity measurement to be applicable to quantum error correction.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.92.022335

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Parity measurement is a central tool for many quantum information processing tasks. In this work, we propose a method to directly measure two- and four-qubit parity with low overhead in hardware and software while remaining robust to experimental imperfections. Our scheme relies on dispersive qubit-cavity coupling and photon counting that is sensitive only to intensity; both ingredients are widely realized in many different quantum computing modalities. For a leading technology in quantum computing, superconducting integrated circuits, we analyze the measurement contrast and the back action of the scheme and show that this measurement comes close enough to an ideal parity measurement to be applicable to quantum error correction.
Multiqubit parity measurements are essential to quantum error correction. Current realizations of these measurements often rely on ancilla qubits, a method that is sensitive to faulty two-qubit gates and that requires notable experimental overhead. We propose a hardware-efficient multiqubit parity measurement exploiting the bifurcation dynamics of a parametrically driven nonlinear oscillator. This approach takes advantage of the resonator's parametric oscillation threshold, which depends on the joint parity of dispersively coupled qubits, leading to high-amplitude oscillations for one parity subspace and no oscillation for the other. We present analytical and numerical results for two- and four-qubit parity measurements, with high-fidelity readout preserving the parity eigenpaces. Moreover, we discuss a possible realization that can be readily implemented with the current circuit quantum electrodynamics (QED) experimental toolbox. These results could lead to substantial simplifications in the experimental implementation of quantum error correction and notably of the surface code.
We present a concept for performing direct parity measurements on three or more qubits in microwave structures with superconducting resonators coupled to Josephson-junction qubits. We write the quantum-eraser conditions that must be fulfilled for the parity measurements as requirements for the scattering phase shift of our microwave structure. We show that these conditions can be fulfilled with present-day devices. We present one particular scheme, implemented with two-dimensional cavity techniques, in which each qubit should be coupled equally to two different microwave cavities. The magnitudes of the couplings that are needed are in the range that has been achieved in current experiments. A quantum calculation indicates that the measurement is optimal if the scattering signal can be measured with near single-photon sensitivity. A comparison with an extension of a related proposal from cavity optics is presented. We present a second scheme, for which a scalable implementation of the four-qubit parities of the surface quantum error correction code can be envisioned. It uses three-dimensional cavity structures, using cavity symmetries to achieve the necessary multiple resonant modes within a single resonant structure.
Robust high-fidelity parity measurement is an important operation in many applications of quantum computing. In this work we show how in a circuit QED architecture, one can measure parity in a single shot at very high contrast by taking advantage of the nonlinear behavior of a strongly driven microwave cavity coupled to one or multiple qubits. We work in a nonlinear dispersive regime treated in an exact dispersive transformation. We show that appropriate tuning of experimental parameters leads to very high contrast in the cavity and therefore to a high-efficiency parity readout with a microwave photon counter or another amplitude detector. These tuning conditions are based on nonlinearity and are hence more robust than previously described linear tuning schemes. In the first part of the paper we show in detail how to achieve this for two-qubit parity measurements and extend this to NNN qubits in the second part of the paper. We also study the quantum nondemolition character of the protocol.
Eigenstate-preserving multi-qubit parity measurements lie at the heart of stabilizer quantum error correction, which is a promising approach to mitigate the problem of decoherence in quantum computers. In this work we explore a high-fidelity, eigenstate-preserving parity readout for superconducting qubits dispersively coupled to a microwave resonator, where the parity bit is encoded in the amplitude of a coherent state of the resonator. Detecting photons emitted by the resonator via a current biased Josephson junction yields information about the parity bit. We analyze theoretically the measurement back action in the limit of a strongly coupled fast detector and show that in general such a parity measurement, while approximately quantum nondemolition is not eigenstate preserving. To remediate this shortcoming we propose a simple dynamical decoupling technique during photon detection, which greatly reduces decoherence within a given parity subspace. Furthermore, by applying a sequence of fast displacement operations interleaved with the dynamical decoupling pulses, the natural bias of this binary detector can be efficiently suppressed. Finally, we introduce the concept of a heralded parity measurement, where a detector click guarantees successful multi-qubit parity detection even for finite detection efficiency.
Joint measurements of two-Pauli observables are powerful tools for both the control and protection of quantum information. By following a simple recipe for measurement choices, single- and two- qubit rotations using two-Pauli parity and single qubit measurements are guaranteed to be unitary while requiring only a single ancilla qubit. This language for measurement based quantum computing is shown to be directly applicable to encoded double quantum dot singlet-triplet spin qubits, by measuring spin-parity between dots from neighboring qubits. Along with exchange interaction, a complete, leakage free, measurement based gate set can be shown, up to a known Pauli correction. Both theoretically exact spin-parity measurements and experimentally demonstrated asymmetric spin-parity measurements are shown to be viable for achieving the proposed measurement based scheme, provided some extra leakage mitigating measurement steps. This method of spin qubit control offers a leakage suppressed, low resource overhead implementation of a measurement-based control that is viable on current spin qubit processor devices.
The capability to perform parity-type measurements is a central ingredient of any fault-tolerant quantum computation architecture with protected qubits. We propose schemes to achieve continuous and quantum non-demolition measurements of a class of parity-type observables for the so-called cat-qubits. While opening new perspectives towards fault-tolerant quantum information processing with superconducting circuits, this work also explores a new regime of non-linear interactions provided by a high-impedance Josephson circuit.