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arXiv:1704.00803 · Physical Review A

Single qubit operations using microwave hyperbolic secant pulses

H. S. Ku, J. L. Long, Xian Wu, Mustafa Bal, Russell E. Lake, Edwin Barnes, Sophia E. Economou, David P. Pappas

Published Oct 30, 2017• 16 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

It has been known since the early days of quantum mechanics that hyperbolic secant pulses possess the unique property that they can perform full-cycle Rabi oscillations on two-level quantum systems independently of the pulse detuning. More recently, it was realized that they induce detuning-controlled phases without changing state populations. Here, we experimentally demonstrate the properties of hyperbolic secant pulses on superconducting transmon qubits and contrast them with the more commonly used Gaussian and square waves. We further show that these properties can be exploited to implement phase gates, nominally without exiting the computational subspace. This enables us to demonstrate a microwave-driven $Z$ rotation with a single control parameter, the detuning.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.96.042339

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It has been known since the early days of quantum mechanics that hyperbolic secant pulses possess the unique property that they can perform full-cycle Rabi oscillations on two-level quantum systems independently of the pulse detuning. More recently, it was realized that they induce detuning-controlled phases without changing state populations. Here, we experimentally demonstrate the properties of hyperbolic secant pulses on superconducting transmon qubits and contrast them with the more commonly used Gaussian and square waves. We further show that these properties can be exploited to implement phase gates, nominally without exiting the computational subspace. This enables us to demonstrate a microwave-driven ZZZ rotation with a single control parameter, the detuning.
The quantum state of a flux qubit was successfully pulse controlled by using a resonant microwave. We observed Ramsey fringes by applying a pair of phase-shifted π∕2 microwave pulses without introducing detuning. With this method, the qubit state can be rotated on an arbitrary axis in the x-y plane of the Bloch sphere in a rotating frame. We successfully observed qubit Larmor precession stroboscopically with an angular velocity of 2π×11.4Grad∕s. In combination with Rabi pulses, this method enables us to achieve full control of single qubit rotation with shorter operation time.
In the circuit quantum electrodynamics architecture, both the resonance frequency and the coupling of superconducting qubits to microwave field modes can be controlled via external electric and magnetic fields to explore qubit-photon dynamics in a wide parameter range. Here, we experimentally demonstrate and analyze a scheme for tuning the coupling between a transmon qubit and a microwave resonator using a single coherent drive tone. We treat the transmon as a three-level system, with the qubit subspace defined by the ground and the second excited states. If the drive frequency matches the difference between the resonator and the qubit frequencies, a Jaynes-Cummings-type interaction is induced, which is tunable in both amplitude and phase. We show that coupling strengths of about 10 MHz can be achieved in our setup, limited only by the anharmonicity of the transmon qubit. This scheme has been successfully used to generate microwave photons with a controlled temporal shape [M. Pechal et al., Phys. Rev. X 4, 041010 (2014)] and can be directly implemented with superconducting quantum devices featuring larger anharmonicity for higher coupling strengths.
We experimentally constructed an all-microwave scheme for the controlled-NOT (cNOT) gate between two superconducting transmon qubits in a three dimensional cavity. Our cNOT gate is based on the microwave-activated phase (MAP) gate, which requires an additional procedure to compensate the accumulated phases during the operation of the MAP gate. We applied Z-axis phase gates using microwave hyperbolic secant pulse on both qubits with adequate rotation angles systematically calibrated by separate measurements. We evaluated the gate performance of the constructed cNOT gate by performing two-qubit quantum process tomography (QPT). Finally, we present the experimental implementation of the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm using the cNOT gate.
Generating high-fidelity, tunable entanglement between qubits is crucial for realizing gate-based quantum computation. In superconducting circuits, tunable interactions are often implemented using flux-tunable qubits or coupling elements, adding control complexity and noise sources. Here, we realize a tunable ZZZZZZ interaction between two transmon qubits with fixed frequencies and fixed coupling, induced by driving both transmons off-resonantly. We show tunable coupling over one order of magnitude larger than the static coupling, and change the sign of the interaction, enabling cancellation of the idle coupling. Further, this interaction is amenable to large quantum processors: the drive frequency can be flexibly chosen to avoid spurious transitions, and because both transmons are driven, it is resilient to microwave crosstalk. We apply this interaction to implement a controlled phase (CZ) gate with a gate fidelity of 99.43(1)%99.43(1)\%99.43(1)% as measured by cycle benchmarking, and we find the fidelity is limited by incoherent errors.
High-fidelity control of superconducting qubits requires carefully shaped microwave pulses to avoid several different kinds of error at once. This article is a pedagogical bridging text aimed at upper-level undergraduate and early graduate students who have completed an introductory quantum mechanics course and a first course in quantum computing or quantum information, but who have not yet encountered the physical implementation of qubit gates. We integrate physical intuition for pulse design, analytical gate-level descriptions, and practical hardware considerations into a single, derivation-driven narrative, with explicit learning objectives. We begin with simple pulse envelopes and their spectral properties, showing how finite bandwidth produces leakage outside the computational subspace. This motivates the derivative removal by adiabatic gate (DRAG) technique, which we derive explicitly using the Magnus expansion, obtaining a clear, order-by-order account of which physical error channel appears at which order and why DRAG's cancellation is necessarily incomplete. We discuss the practical hardware realities of control pulse generation, focusing on arbitrary waveform generators (AWG), local oscillators (LO), and IQ mixing. Finally, we extend the discussion to two-qubit operation via the cross-resonance gate, and interpret how driving the control qubit at the target qubit's transition frequency necessarily produces several unwanted interaction terms alongside the desired one, and how successive generations of pulse-engineering strategies have been designed to suppress them.
All-microwave control of fixed-frequency superconducting quantum systems offers the potential to reduce control circuit complexity and increase system coherence. Nevertheless, due to the limited control flexibility in qubit parameters, one has to address several issues, such as quantum crosstalk and frequency crowding, for scaling up qubit architecture with nontunable elements. This paper proposes a microwave-activated two-qubit gate scheme for two fixed-frequency transmon qubits coupled via a fixed-frequency transmon coupler. The protocol relies on applying a microwave pulse exclusively to the coupler, enabling the implementation of a controlled-ZZZ gate. We show that the gate fidelity exceeding 0.999 can be achieved within 150 ns, excluding decoherence effects. Moreover, we also show that leakage from the computational subspace to noncomputational states can also be effectively suppressed.