Abstract In hybrid circuit quantum electrodynamics (QED) architectures containing both ancilla qubits and bosonic modes, a controlled beam splitter (cBS) gate is a powerful resource. It can be used to create (up to a controlled-parity operation) an ancilla-controlled SWAP gate acting on two bosonic modes. This is the essential element required to execute the ‘swap test’ for purity, prepare quantum non-Gaussian entanglement and directly measure nonlinear functionals of quantum states. It also constitutes an important gate for hybrid discrete/continuous-variable quantum computation. We propose a new realization of a hybrid cSWAP utilizing ‘Kerr-cat’ qubits—anharmonic oscillators subject to strong two-photon driving. The Kerr-cat is used to generate a controlled-phase beam splitter operation. When combined with an ordinary beam splitter one obtains a cBS and from this a cSWAP. The strongly biased error channel for the Kerr-cat has phase flips which dominate over bit flips. This yields important benefits for the cSWAP gate which becomes non-destructive and transparent to the dominate error. Our proposal is straightforward to implement and, based on currently existing experimental parameters, should achieve cBS gates with high fidelities comparable to current ordinary beam-splitter operations available in circuit QED.
Abstract In hybrid circuit quantum electrodynamics (QED) architectures containing both ancilla qubits and bosonic modes, a controlled beam splitter (cBS) gate is a powerful resource. It can be used to create (up to a controlled-parity operation) an ancilla-controlled SWAP gate acting on two bosonic modes. This is the essential element required to execute the ‘swap test’ for purity, prepare quantum non-Gaussian entanglement and directly measure nonlinear functionals of quantum states. It also constitutes an important gate for hybrid discrete/continuous-variable quantum computation. We propose a new realization of a hybrid cSWAP utilizing ‘Kerr-cat’ qubits—anharmonic oscillators subject to strong two-photon driving. The Kerr-cat is used to generate a controlled-phase beam splitter operation. When combined with an ordinary beam splitter one obtains a cBS and from this a cSWAP. The strongly biased error channel for the Kerr-cat has phase flips which dominate over bit flips. This yields important benefits for the cSWAP gate which becomes non-destructive and transparent to the dominate error. Our proposal is straightforward to implement and, based on currently existing experimental parameters, should achieve cBS gates with high fidelities comparable to current ordinary beam-splitter operations available in circuit QED.
We introduce a hybrid qubit-boson beam-splitter gate in which a microwave cavity mode couples to an exchange-dressed two-level subsystem of an interacting two-qubit system in the presence of Kerr nonlinearity. Starting from a general circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) model, we derive the corresponding hybrid qubit-cavity interaction, develop its open-system description including photon- and qubit-sector-bath-induced dissipation and obtain in the weak-dissipation regime an analytical expression for the average gate fidelity. We further identify carbon-nanotube circuit QED as a concrete platform for implementing and controlling the gate, provide a representative operating regime and perform noiseless and noisy numerical simulations to study the gate dynamics and benchmark the analytical results. Beyond this implementation route, the proposed hybrid primitive provides a natural building block for many-body dynamics, including quantum-cellular-automaton (QCA) and lattice-gauge-inspired architectures and, through its collision-model reformulation, also suggests connections to noisy QCA, non-Markovian extensions and reservoir-style quantum information processing.
Bosonic quantum error correction has proven to be a successful approach for extending the coherence of quantum memories, but to execute deep quantum circuits, high-fidelity gates between encoded qubits are needed.To that end, we present a family of error-detectable two-qubit gates for a variety of bosonic encodings.From a new geometric framework based on a "Bloch sphere" of bosonic operators, we construct ZZ L (θ) and exponential-SWAP(θ) gates for the binomial, four-legged cat, dual-rail, and several other bosonic codes.The gate Hamiltonian is simple to engineer, requiring only a programmable beam splitter between two bosonic qubits and an ancilla dispersively coupled to one qubit.This Hamiltonian can be realized in circuit QED hardware with ancilla transmons and microwave cavities.The proposed theoretical framework was developed for circuit QED but is generalizable to any platform that can effectively generate this Hamiltonian.Crucially, one can also detect first-order errors in the ancilla and the bosonic qubits during the gates.We show that this allows one to reach error-detected gate fidelities at the 0.01% level with today's hardware, limited only by second-order hardware errors.
Fault-tolerant quantum computation with bosonic qubits often necessitates the use of noisy discrete-variable ancillae. In this work, we establish a comprehensive and practical fault-tolerance framework for such a hybrid system and synthesize it with fault-tolerant protocols by combining bosonic quantum error correction (QEC) and advanced quantum control techniques. We introduce essential building blocks of error-corrected gadgets by leveraging ancilla-assisted bosonic operations using a generalized variant of path-independent quantum control. Using these building blocks, we construct a universal set of error-corrected gadgets that tolerate a single-photon loss and an arbitrary ancilla fault for four-legged cat qubits. Notably, our construction requires only dispersive coupling between bosonic modes and ancillae, as well as beam-splitter coupling between bosonic modes, both of which have been experimentally demonstrated with strong strengths and high accuracy. Moreover, each error-corrected bosonic qubit is comprised of only a single bosonic mode and a three-level ancilla, featuring the hardware efficiency of bosonic QEC in the full fault-tolerant setting. We numerically demonstrate the feasibility of our schemes using current experimental parameters in the circuit-QED platform. Finally, we present a hardware-efficient architecture for fault-tolerant quantum computing by concatenating the four-legged cat qubits with an outer qubit code utilizing only beam-splitter couplings. Our estimates suggest that the overall noise threshold can be reached using existing hardware. These developed fault-tolerant schemes extend beyond their applicability to four-legged cat qubits and can be adapted for other rotation-symmetrical codes, offering a promising avenue toward scalable and robust quantum computation with bosonic qubits.
Stabilized cat qubits that possess biased noise channel with bit-flip errors exponentially smaller than phase-flip errors. Together with a set of bias-preserving (BP) gates, cat qubits are a promising candidate for realizing hardware efficient quantum error correction and fault-tolerant quantum computing. Compared to dissipatively stabilized cat qubits, the Kerr cat qubits can in principle support faster gate operations with higher gate fidelity, benefiting from the large energy gap that protects the code space. However, the leakage of the Kerr cats can increase the minor type of errors and compromise the noise bias. Both the fast implementation of gates and the interaction with environment can lead to such detrimental leakage if no sophisticated controls are applied. In this work, we introduce new fine-control techniques to overcome the above obstacles for Kerr cat qubits. To suppress the gate leakage, we use the derivative-based transition suppression technique to design derivative-based controls for the Kerr BP gates. We show that the fine-controlled gates can simultaneously have high gate fidelity and high noise bias and when applied to concatenated quantum error correction, can not only improve the logical error rate but also reduce resource overhead. To suppress the environment-induced leakage, we introduce colored single-photon dissipation, which can continuously cool the Kerr cats and suppress the minor errors while not enhancing the major errors.
Fault-tolerant quantum computation with bosonic qubits often necessitates the use of noisy discrete-variable ancillae. In this work, we establish a comprehensive and practical fault-tolerance framework for such a hybrid system and synthesize it with fault-tolerant protocols by combining bosonic quantum error correction (QEC) and advanced quantum control techniques. We introduce essential building blocks of error-corrected gadgets by leveraging ancilla-assisted bosonic operations using a generalized variant of path-independent quantum control. Using these building blocks, we construct a universal set of error-corrected gadgets that tolerate a single-photon loss and an arbitrary ancilla fault for four-legged cat qubits. Notably, our construction requires only dispersive coupling between bosonic modes and ancillae, as well as beam-splitter coupling between bosonic modes, both of which have been experimentally demonstrated with strong strengths and high accuracy. Moreover, each error-corrected bosonic qubit is comprised of only a single bosonic mode and a three-level ancilla, featuring the hardware efficiency of bosonic QEC in the full fault-tolerant setting. We numerically demonstrate the feasibility of our schemes using current experimental parameters in the circuit-QED platform. Finally, we present a hardware-efficient architecture for fault-tolerant quantum computing by concatenating the four-legged cat qubits with an outer qubit code utilizing only beam-splitter couplings. Our estimates suggest that the overall noise threshold can be reached using existing hardware. These developed fault-tolerant schemes extend beyond their applicability to four-legged cat qubits and can be adapted for other rotation-symmetrical codes, offering a promising avenue toward scalable and robust quantum computation with bosonic qubits. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Encoding a qubit in a high quality superconducting microwave cavity offers the opportunity to perform the first layer of error correction in a single device, but presents a challenge: how can quantum oscillators be controlled while introducing a minimal number of additional error channels? We focus on the two-qubit portion of this control problem by using a 3-wave mixing coupling element to engineer a programmable beamsplitter interaction between two bosonic modes separated by more than an octave in frequency, without introducing major additional sources of decoherence. Combining this with single-oscillator control provided by a dispersively coupled transmon provides a framework for quantum control of multiple encoded qubits. The beamsplitter interaction gbs is fast relative to the timescale of oscillator decoherence, enabling over 103 beamsplitter operations per coherence time, and approaching the typical rate of the dispersive coupling χ used for individual oscillator control. Further, the programmable coupling is engineered without adding unwanted interactions between the oscillators, as evidenced by the high on-off ratio of the operations, which can exceed 105. We then introduce a new protocol to realize a hybrid controlled-SWAP operation in the regime gbs≈χ, in which a transmon provides the control bit for the SWAP of two bosonic modes. Finally, we use this gate in a SWAP test to project a pair of bosonic qubits into a Bell state with measurement-corrected fidelity of 95.5%±0.2%.