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arXiv:2308.16040 · Physical Review Letters

Native Approach to Controlled- Z Gates in Inductively Coupled Fluxonium Qubits

Xizheng Ma, Gengyan Zhang, Feng Wu, Feng Bao, Xu Chang, Jianjun Chen, Hao Deng, Ran Gao, Xun Gao, Lijuan Hu, Honghong Ji, Hsiang‐Sheng Ku, Kannan Lu, Lu Ma, Liyong Mao, Zhijun Song, Hantao Sun, Chengchun Tang, Fei Wang, Hongcheng Wang, Tenghui Wang, Tian Xia, Make Ying, Huijuan Zhan, Tao Zhou, Mengyu Zhu, Qingbin Zhu, Yaoyun Shi, Hui‐Hai Zhao, Chunqing Deng

Published Feb 8, 2024• 23 citations
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Abstract

The fluxonium qubits have emerged as a promising platform for gate-based quantum information processing. However, their extraordinary protection against charge fluctuations comes at a cost: when coupled capacitively, the qubit-qubit interactions are restricted to XX interactions. Consequently, effective ZZ or XZ interactions are only constructed either by temporarily populating higher-energy states, or by exploiting perturbative effects under microwave driving. Instead, we propose and demonstrate an inductive coupling scheme, which offers a wide selection of native qubit-qubit interactions for fluxonium. In particular, we leverage a built-in, flux-controlled ZZ interaction to perform qubit entanglement. To combat the increased flux-noise-induced dephasing away from the flux-insensitive position, we use a continuous version of the dynamical decoupling scheme to perform noise filtering. Combining these, we demonstrate a 20 ns controlled-z gate with a mean fidelity of 99.53%. More than confirming the efficacy of our gate scheme, this high-fidelity result also reveals a promising but rarely explored parameter space uniquely suitable for gate operations between fluxonium qubits.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.132.060602

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The fluxonium qubits have emerged as a promising platform for gate-based quantum information processing. However, their extraordinary protection against charge fluctuations comes at a cost: when coupled capacitively, the qubit-qubit interactions are restricted to XX interactions. Consequently, effective ZZ or XZ interactions are only constructed either by temporarily populating higher-energy states, or by exploiting perturbative effects under microwave driving. Instead, we propose and demonstrate an inductive coupling scheme, which offers a wide selection of native qubit-qubit interactions for fluxonium. In particular, we leverage a built-in, flux-controlled ZZ interaction to perform qubit entanglement. To combat the increased flux-noise-induced dephasing away from the flux-insensitive position, we use a continuous version of the dynamical decoupling scheme to perform noise filtering. Combining these, we demonstrate a 20 ns controlled-z gate with a mean fidelity of 99.53%. More than confirming the efficacy of our gate scheme, this high-fidelity result also reveals a promising but rarely explored parameter space uniquely suitable for gate operations between fluxonium qubits.
The superconducting fluxonium circuit is an artificial atom with a strongly anharmonic spectrum: When biased at a half flux quantum, the lowest qubit transition is an order of magnitude smaller in frequency than those to higher levels. Similar to conventional atomic systems, such a frequency separation between the computational and noncomputational subspaces allows independent optimizations of the qubit coherence and two-qubit interactions. Here, we describe a controlled-ZZZ gate for two fluxoniums connected either capacitively or inductively, with qubit transitions fixed near 500MHz500\phantom{\rule{3.33333pt}{0ex}}\mathrm{MHz}500MHz. The gate is activated by a microwave drive at a resonance involving the second excited state. We estimate intrinsic gate fidelities over 99.9% with gate times below 100 ns.
Hybrid superconducting architectures combining different types of qubits offer a promising platform for exploiting their complementary advantages, yet high-fidelity entangling gates remain challenging because of strong nonlinearities and residual qubit-qubit interactions. Here, we propose a high-fidelity controlled-Z (CZ) gate for a hybrid circuit comprising a fluxonium qubit, a fixed-frequency transmon qubit, and a flux-tunable transmon coupler. By modulating only the external magnetic flux applied to the coupler, the qubit-qubit interaction is dynamically engineered for conditional-phase accumulation while the residual interaction is suppressed at idle, mitigating spectator-induced errors. We employ a low-dimensional Fourier-cosine pulse parameterization and a physically motivated cost function to independently suppress conditional-phase errors and leakage from the computational subspace. Numerical simulations demonstrate that a microwave-free CZ gate can be realized within 25ns25 \mathrm{ns}25ns, with an average gate fidelity exceeding 99.99%99.99\%99.99% and leakage below 10−510^{-5}10−5. Using experimentally relevant superconducting-qubit parameters and accounting for decoherence, the proposed scheme maintains a CZ-gate fidelity of approximately 99.9%99.9\%99.9%. We further extend the analysis to larger coupled architectures and find that the CZ-gate infidelity remains below 10−410^{-4}10−4 in the presence of spectator qubits. These results establish single-parameter flux control as a simple and robust approach for realizing high-fidelity entangling gates in heterogeneous superconducting quantum architectures.
Fluxoniums, as partially-protected superconducting qubits are promising to be employed to build high-performance large-scale quantum processor. The recently proposed ``integer fluxonium" operates at zero external flux bias, with a frequency of approximately 3 GHz. Single-qubit gate fidelity has been demonstrated to exceed 99.9%99.9\%99.9%, while two-qubit gate schemes and scalable architectures remain underexplored. In this work, we investigate a fluxonium-transmon-fluxonium (FTF) coupling architecture using integer fluxoniums. We first confirm suppression of ZZZZZZ interaction in the FTF system and then propose two high-fidelity controlled-ZZZ (CZ) gate schemes utilizing the coupler control: a flux-activated adiabatic gate scheme and a microwave-activated non-adiabatic gate scheme. Both schemes are capable of achieving low coherent error on the order of 1×10−61 \times 10^{-6}1×10−6 within gate durations of several tens of nanoseconds. Additionally, we discuss a hybrid circuit system in which an integer fluxonium is coupled to a conventional fluxonium through a transmon coupler. Our proposal provides insights for future implementations of large-scale quantum circuits based on integer fluxonium devices.
A superconducting fluxonium circuit is an RF-superconducting quantum interference device-type flux qubit that uses a large inductance built from an array of Josephson junctions or a high kinetic inductance material. This inductance suppresses charge sensitivity exponentially and flux sensitivity quadratically. In contrast to the transmon qubit, the anharmonicity of fluxonium can be large and positive, allowing for better separation between the low energy qubit manifold of the circuit and higher-lying excited states. Here, we propose a tunable coupling scheme for implementing two-qubit gates on fixed-frequency fluxonium qubits, biased at half flux quantum. In this system, both qubits and couplers are coupled capacitively and implemented as fluxonium circuits with an additional harmonic mode. We investigate the performance of the scheme by simulating a universal two-qubit fSim gate. In the proposed approach, we rely on a planar on-chip architecture for the whole device. Our design is compatible with existing hardware for transmon-based devices with the additional advantage of lower qubit frequency facilitating high-precision gating.
The fluxonium qubit is a promising candidate for quantum computation due to its long coherence times and large anharmonicity. We present a tunable coupler that realizes strong inductive coupling between two heavy-fluxonium qubits, each with ∼50\sim50∼50MHz frequencies and ∼5\sim5∼5 GHz anharmonicities. The coupler enables the qubits to have a large tuning range of XX\textit{XX}XX coupling strengths (−35-35−35 to 757575 MHz). The ZZ\textit{ZZ}ZZ coupling strength is <3<3<3kHz across the entire coupler bias range, and <100<100<100Hz at the coupler off-position. These qualities lead to fast, high-fidelity single- and two-qubit gates. By driving at the difference frequency of the two qubits, we realize a iSWAP\sqrt{i\mathrm{SWAP}}iSWAP​ gate in 258258258ns with fidelity 99.72%99.72\%99.72%, and by driving at the sum frequency of the two qubits, we achieve a bSWAP\sqrt{b\mathrm{SWAP}}bSWAP​ gate in 102102102ns with fidelity 99.91%99.91\%99.91%. This latter gate is only 5 qubit Larmor periods in length. We run cross-entropy benchmarking for over 202020 consecutive hours and measure stable gate fidelities, with bSWAP\sqrt{b\mathrm{SWAP}}bSWAP​ drift (2σ2 σ2σ) <0.02%< 0.02\%<0.02% and iSWAP\sqrt{i\mathrm{SWAP}}iSWAP​ drift <0.08%< 0.08\%<0.08%.
We propose and demonstrate an architecture for fluxonium-fluxonium two-qubit gates mediated by transmon couplers (FTF, for fluxonium-transmon-fluxonium).Relative to architectures that exclusively rely on a direct coupling between fluxonium qubits, FTF enables stronger couplings for gates using noncomputational states while simultaneously suppressing the static controlled-phase entangling rate (ZZ) down to kilohertz levels, all without requiring strict parameter matching.Here, we implement FTF with a flux-tunable transmon coupler and demonstrate a microwave-activated controlled-Z (CZ) gate whose operation frequency can be tuned over a 2-GHz range, adding frequency allocation freedom for FTFs in larger systems.Across this range, state-of-the-art CZ gate fidelities are observed over many bias points and reproduced across the two devices characterized in this work.After optimizing both the operation frequency and the gate duration, we achieve peak CZ fidelities in the 99.85%-99.9%range.Finally, we implement model-free reinforcement learning of the pulse parameters to boost the mean gate fidelity up to 99.922% Æ 0.009%, averaged over roughly an hour between scheduled training runs.Beyond the microwave-activated CZ gate we present here, FTF can be applied to a variety of other fluxonium gate schemes to improve gate fidelities and passively reduce unwanted ZZ interactions.