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arXiv:1802.10112 · Science Advances

Qubit parity measurement by parametric driving in circuit QED

Baptiste Royer, Shruti Puri, Alexandre Blais

Published Nov 2, 2018• 30 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1126/sciadv.aau1695

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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.
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.
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.
We study bifurcation measurement of a multilevel superconducting qubit using a nonlinear resonator biased in the straddling regime, where the resonator frequency sits between two qubit transition frequencies. We find that high-fidelity bifurcation measurements are possible because of the enhanced qubit-state-dependent pull of the resonator frequency, the behavior of qubit-induced nonlinearities, and the reduced Purcell decay rate of the qubit that can be realized in this regime. Numerical simulations find up to a threefold improvement in qubit readout fidelity when operating in, rather than outside of, the straddling regime. High-fidelity measurements can be obtained at much smaller qubit-resonator couplings than current typical experimental realizations, reducing spectral crowding and potentially simplifying the implementation of multiqubit devices.
Quantum control of a linear oscillator using a static dispersive coupling to a nonlinear ancilla underpins a wide variety of experiments in circuit QED. Extending this control to more than one oscillator while minimizing the required connectivity to the ancilla would enable hardware-efficient multi-mode entanglement and measurements. We show that the spectrum of an ancilla statically coupled to a single mode can be made to depend on the joint photon number in two modes by applying a strong parametric beamsplitter coupling between them. This ‘joint-photon number-splitting’ regime extends single-oscillator techniques to two-oscillator control, which we use to realize a hardware-efficient erasure check for a dual-rail qubit encoded in two superconducting cavities. This scheme leverages the high-fidelity beamsplitter coupling already required for single- and two-qubit gates while permitting minimal crosstalk between circuit elements. Furthermore, the flexibility to choose the pulse shape allows us to limit the susceptibility to different error channels. We use this scheme to detect leakage errors with a missed erasure fraction of (9.0 ± 0.5) × 10 −4 while incurring an erasure rate of 2.92 ± 0.01% and a Pauli error rate of 0.31 ± 0.01%, both of which are dominated by cavity errors.
We analyze a two-qubit parity measurement based on dispersive readout in circuit quantum electrodynamics. The back action on the qubits has two qualitatively different contributions. One is an unavoidable dephasing in one of the parity subspaces, arising during the transient time of switching on the measurement. The other part is a stochastic rotation of the phase in the same subspace, which persists during the whole measurement. The latter can be determined from the full measurement record using the method of state estimation. Our main result is that the outcome of this phase determination process is independent of the initial state in the state estimation procedure. The procedure can thus be used in a measurement situation where the initial state is unknown. We discuss how this feedback method can be used to achieve a high-fidelity parity measurement for moderate values of the cavity-qubit coupling strength. Finally, we discuss the robustness of the feedback procedure toward errors in the measurement record.
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.