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arXiv:2404.11847 · Physical Review Applied

Parametrically controlled microwave-photonic interface for the fluxonium

Ke Nie, Aayam Bista, Edmond K. C. Chow, Wolfgang Pfaff, Angela Kou

Published Nov 8, 2024• 8 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Converting quantum information from stationary qubits to traveling photons enables both fast qubit initialization and efficient generation of flying qubits for redistribution of quantum information. This conversion can be performed using cavity-sideband transitions. In the fluxonium, however, direct cavity-sideband transitions are forbidden due to parity symmetry. Here we circumvent this parity selection rule by using a three-wave mixing element to couple the fluxonium to a resonator. We experimentally demonstrate a scheme for interfacing the fluxonium with traveling photons through microwave-induced parametric conversion. We perform fast reset on the fluxonium qubit, initializing it with > 95 % ground-state population. We then implement controlled release and temporal shaping of a flying photon, useful for quantum state transfer and remote entanglement. The simplicity and flexibility of our demonstrated scheme enables fluxonium-based remote entanglement architectures. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

DOI
10.1103/physrevapplied.22.054021

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Converting quantum information from stationary qubits to traveling photons enables both fast qubit initialization and efficient generation of flying qubits for redistribution of quantum information. This conversion can be performed using cavity-sideband transitions. In the fluxonium, however, direct cavity-sideband transitions are forbidden due to parity symmetry. Here we circumvent this parity selection rule by using a three-wave mixing element to couple the fluxonium to a resonator. We experimentally demonstrate a scheme for interfacing the fluxonium with traveling photons through microwave-induced parametric conversion. We perform fast reset on the fluxonium qubit, initializing it with > 95 % ground-state population. We then implement controlled release and temporal shaping of a flying photon, useful for quantum state transfer and remote entanglement. The simplicity and flexibility of our demonstrated scheme enables fluxonium-based remote entanglement architectures. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Fast and high-fidelity qubit initialization is crucial for low-frequency qubits such as fluxonium, and in applications of many quantum algorithms and quantum error correction codes. In a circuit quantum electrodynamics system, the initialization is typically achieved by transferring the state between the qubit and a short-lived cavity through microwave driving, also known as the sideband cooling process in atomic system. Constrained by the selection rules from the parity symmetry of the wave functions, the sideband transitions are only enabled by multiphoton processes which require multitone or strong driving. Leveraging the flux tunability of fluxonium, we circumvent this limitation by breaking flux symmetry to enable an interaction between a noncomputational qubit transition and the cavity excitation. With single-tone sideband driving, we realize qubit initialization with a fidelity exceeding 99% within a duration of 300 ns, robust against the variation of control parameters. Furthermore, we show that our initialization scheme has a built-in benefit in simultaneously removing the second-excited state population of the qubit, and can be easily incorporated into a large-scale fluxonium processor.
Photons as flying qubits are ideal carriers of quantum information. However, efficient quantum interfaces which transfer flying into stationary qubits and vice versa are needed to realize complex quantum networks. Stationary qubit systems (atoms, ions, or solid state implementations) couple to photons via characteristic optical transitions. In order to establish key quantum operations, such as coherent photon storage, entanglement swapping, etc., high-quality photons with a tailored spectral, spatial, and temporal mode are needed. One way to generate these photons is to use the stationary qubit systems themselves. Another approach which does not impose limitations in terms of the photon’s wavelength or bandwidth relies on all-optical single photon sources. An example is spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC) inside an optical cavity with well-defined linewidth. In SPDC, a pump photon incident on a nonlinear medium is split into two photons of lower energy that are often referred to as signal and idler. Resonating the fluorescent fields, the setup becomes an optical parametric oscillator (OPO) far below the threshold. The usually THz broad emission spectrum of SPDC then follows the Airy function of the resonator. The spectral bandwidth of the generated photons can easily reach values of several MHz, which is comparable to atom resonance linewidths. By introducing additional losses or simply changing the cavity mirror reflectivities the bandwidth is tunable up to several 100 MHz. This is comparable to the bandwidth of single photons generated by e.g. quantum dots.
We consider a pair of quantum dot-based spin qubits that interact via microwave photons in a superconducting cavity and that are also parametrically driven by separate external electric fields. For this system, we formulate a model for spin qubit entanglement in the presence of mutually off-resonant qubit and cavity frequencies. We show that the sidebands generated via the driving fields enable highly tunable qubit-qubit entanglement using only ac control and without requiring the qubit and cavity frequencies to be tuned into simultaneous resonance. The model we derive can be mapped to a variety of qubit types, including detuning-driven one-electron spin qubits in double quantum dots and three-electron resonant exchange qubits in triple quantum dots. The high degree of nonlinearity inherent in spin qubits renders these systems particularly favorable for parametric drive-activated entanglement. We determine multiple common resonance conditions for the two driven qubits and the cavity and identify experimentally relevant parameter regimes that enable the implementation of entangling gates with suppressed sensitivity to cavity photon occupation and decay. The parametrically driven sideband resonance approach that we describe provides a promising route toward scalability and modularity in spin-based quantum information processing through drive-enabled tunability that can also be implemented in micromagnet-free electron and hole systems for spin-photon coupling. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
We present a scheme of control for the arbitrary interplay between a stationary qubit and a flying qubit (carried by a single-photon wavepacket) at a quantum interface composed of a three-level system coupled to a continuum through a cavity. It can be used for generation or reception of an arbitrarily shaped single-photon wavepacket. The generation process can also be controlled to create entanglement between the stationary qubit and flying qubit. The generation and reception operation can be combined to perform quantum network operations such as transfer, swap and entanglement creation for qubits at distant nodes.
We propose a family of microwave-activated entangling gates on two capacitively coupled fluxonium qubits.A microwave pulse applied to either qubit at a frequency near the half-frequency of the |00 -|11 transition induces two-photon Rabi oscillations with a negligible leakage outside the computational subspace, owing to the strong anharmonicity of fluxoniums.By adjusting the drive frequency, amplitude, and duration, we obtain the gate family that is locally equivalent to the fermionic-simulation gates such as √ SWAP-like and controlled-phase gates.The gate error can be tuned below 10 -4 for a pulse duration under 100 ns without excessive circuit parameter matching.Given that the fluxonium coherence time can exceed 1 ms, our gate scheme is promising for large-scale quantum processors.
The number of superconducting qubits contained in a single quantum processor is increasing steadily. However, to realize a truly useful quantum computer, it is inevitable to increase the number of qubits much further by distributing quantum information among distant processors using flying qubits. A key element towards this goal is a deterministic quantum interaction between superconducting-atom and propagating microwave-photon qubits. Here, we confirm the bidirectional state transfer between them, which completes by simply reflecting the photon at the atom. The averaged fidelity of the photon-to-atom (atom-to-photon) state transfer reaches 0.826 (0.801), limited mainly by the lifetime of the atom qubit. The present technology would be useful for future distributed quantum computation with superconducting qubits. Published by the American Physical Society 2024