Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

arXiv:2410.00495 · PRX Quantum

Subharmonic Control of a Fluxonium Qubit via a Purcell-Protected Flux Line

J. Schirk, Florian Wallner, L. Huang, Ivan Tsitsilin, N. Bruckmoser, L. Koch, D. Bunch, Niklas J. Glaser, Gerhard B. P. Huber, Martin Knudsen, Gleb Krylov, Achim Marx, F. Pfeiffer, L. Richard, Federico Roy, João H. Romeiro, M. Singh, Lasse Södergren, E Dionis, Dominique Sugny, Max Werninghaus, Klaus Liegener, C. M. F. Schneider, Stefan Filipp

Published Jun 24, 2025• 9 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Protecting qubits from environmental noise while maintaining strong coupling for fast high-fidelity control is a central challenge for quantum information processing. Here, we demonstrate a control scheme for superconducting fluxonium qubits that eliminates qubit decay through the control channel by suppressing the environmental density of states at the transition frequency. Adding a low-pass filter on the flux line allows for flux-biasing and, at the same time, coherently controlling the fluxonium qubit by parametrically driving it at integer fractions of its transition frequency. We compare the filtered to the unfiltered configuration and find a 5-times-longer T 1 , and a 10-times-improved T 2 -echo time in the filtered case. We demonstrate coherent control with up to 11-photon subharmonic drives, highlighting the strong nonlinearity of the fluxonium potential. Measured Rabi frequencies and drive-induced frequency shifts show excellent agreement with numerical and analytical models. Furthermore, we show the equivalence of a 3-photon subharmonic drive to an on-resonance drive by benchmarking subharmonic gate fidelities above 99.94%. These results open up a scalable path for full qubit control through a single Purcell-protected channel, providing strong suppression of control-induced decoherence and enabling wiring-efficient superconducting quantum processors.

DOI
10.1103/yx15-jyl7

Related papers

Decay-protected superconducting qubit with fast control enabled by integrated on-chip filters

Aashish Sah, Suman Kundu, Heikki Suominen +2 more

Abstract Achieving fast gates and long coherence times for superconducting qubits presents challenges, typically requiring either a stronger coupling of the drive line or an excessively strong microwave signal to the qubit. To address this, we introduce on-chip filters of the qubit drive exhibiting a stopband at the qubit frequency, thus enabling long coherence times and strong coupling at the subharmonic frequency, facilitating fast single-qubit gates, and reduced thermal load. The filters exhibit an extrinsic relaxation time of a few seconds while enabling sub-10-ns gates with subharmonic control. Here we show up to 200-fold improvement in the measured relaxation time at the stopband. Furthermore, we implement subharmonic driving of Rabi oscillations with a π pulse duration of 12 ns. Our demonstration of on-chip filters and efficient subharmonic driving in a two-dimensional quantum processor paves the way for a scalable qubit architecture with reduced thermal load and noise from the control line.

arXiv:2402.08906•Communications Physics•Jul 12, 2024•14 citations

Unified Flux Control Architecture for Fluxonium Qubits

Xianchuang Pan, Jiahui Wang, Tao Zhou +14 more

Control architectures that reduce hardware overhead while maintaining high-fidelity operations are essential for the continued scaling of superconducting quantum processors. Here we experimentally realize a unified control architecture for fluxonium qubits, in which both transverse ($XY$) and longitudinal ($Z$) operations are implemented through a single flux-control channel driven by a single arbitrary waveform generator channel. This architecture imposes competing requirements on the shared control channel, which must simultaneously support low-frequency flux transmission for reset operations while strongly attenuating broadband noise near the qubit transition frequency. We address this challenge through frequency-selective cryogenic filtering together with compensated waveform synthesis that corrects the pulse distortion introduced by the filtered control line. Experimentally, this approach preserves coherence times above 100 $μ$s while enabling active reset with approximately 98% fidelity and 20-ns single-qubit gates with fidelities exceeding 99.99%. We further demonstrate FPGA-native instruction-level waveform synthesis based on reusable pulse primitives for unified flux control. These results establish unified flux control as a scalable architecture for fluxonium qubits that reduces control hardware overhead while preserving high-fidelity operation.

quant-pharXiv:2605.25948•May 26, 2026•0 citations

Fast superconducting qubit control with subharmonic drives

Mingkang Xia, Chao Zhou, Chenxu Liu +8 more

Increasing the fidelity of single-qubit gates requires a combination of faster pulses and increased qubit coherence. However, these requirements can be contradictory. Additionally, increasing the drive power can heat the qubit’s environment and degrade coherence. In this work, we circumvent this issue and achieve rapid gates by pumping a transmon’s native Kerr at approximately one third of the qubit’s resonant frequency. The subharmonic Rabi rate of the process is proportional to applied drive amplitude cubed, allowing for rapid gates. In addition, we demonstrate that filtering can be used to protect the qubit’s coherence while performing rapid gates. Single qubit gates as short as 37.4 ns are demonstrated with fidelity of 99.91%. We present theoretical calculations indicating that drive induced multi-photon decay will not limit qubit lifetime; calculated power absorption also indicates that this technique could reduce cryostat heating for fast gates, a vital requirement for large-scale quantum computers. There is a trade-off between achieving fast qubit control and preserving long qubit lifetimes. In this work, the authors demonstrate single qubit gates by driving a transmon qubit parametrically at 1/3 of its frequency, creating fast, high-fidelity gates while protecting the qubit lifetime and mitigating heating.

arXiv:2306.10162•Nature Communications•Dec 23, 2025•8 citations

Fluxonium as a Control Qubit for Bosonic Quantum Information

Ke Nie, J. Nofear Bradford, Supriya Mandal +3 more

Bosonic codes in superconducting resonators are a hardware-efficient avenue for quantum error correction and benefit from the inherent bias toward relaxation errors provided by long-lived cavities compared to typical superconducting qubits. The required coupling to an ancillary control qubit, however, can negate these benefits by inducing highly detrimental effects such as excess decoherence and undesired nonlinearities. This is exemplified by the typically employed transmon qubit that imposes limits on cavity operations due to its finite lifetime as well as the inevitably induced self-Kerr nonlinearity. An important question is thus whether a cavity-qubit coupling can be realized that offers readout and control capabilities without spoiling the cavity. Here, motivated by its long lifetime and design flexibility of its Hamiltonian, we experimentally investigate the fluxonium as a control qubit for superconducting cavities. We couple a fluxonium qubit to a superconducting resonator in the strong-dispersive regime and use it to measure the coherence and flux-tunable inherited nonlinearities of the resonator. We then demonstrate quantum control of the oscillator by preparing and characterizing resonator Fock states and their superpositions, with fidelities limited by resonator decay in our planar prototype device. Finally, we show that the fluxonium can realize cavity-couplings that eliminate undesirable cavity nonlinearities and reach regimes of suppressed self-Kerr that are inaccessible to transmon-based devices. Our results thus demonstrate the potential of the fluxonium as a high-performance bosonic control qubit for superconducting cavities that can outperform existing transmon-based architectures.

arXiv:2505.23641•PRX Quantum•Feb 17, 2026•2 citations

Arbitrary controlled-phase gate on fluxonium qubits using differential ac Stark shifts

Haonan Xiong, Quentin Ficheux, Aaron Somoroff +7 more

Large scale quantum computing motivates the invention of two-qubit gate schemes that not only maximize the gate fidelity but also draw minimal resources. In the case of superconducting qubits, the weak anharmonicity of transmons imposes profound constraints on the gate design, leading to increased complexity of devices and control protocols. Here we demonstrate a resource-efficient control over the interaction of strongly-anharmonic fluxonium qubits. Namely, applying an off-resonant drive to noncomputational transitions in a pair of capacitively-coupled fluxoniums induces a $\text{ZZ}$ interaction due to unequal ac Stark shifts of the computational levels. With a continuous choice of frequency and amplitude, the drive can either cancel the static $\text{ZZ}$ term or increase it by an order of magnitude to enable a controlled-phase (CP) gate with an arbitrary programmed phase shift. The cross-entropy benchmarking of these non-Clifford operations yields a sub $1%$ error, limited solely by incoherent processes. Our result demonstrates the advantages of strongly-anharmonic circuits over transmons in designing the next generation of quantum processors.

arXiv:2103.04491•Physical Review Research•Apr 15, 2022•41 citations

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

Xizheng Ma, Gengyan Zhang, Feng Wu +27 more

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.

arXiv:2308.16040•Physical Review Letters•Feb 8, 2024•23 citations
Protecting qubits from environmental noise while maintaining strong coupling for fast high-fidelity control is a central challenge for quantum information processing. Here, we demonstrate a control scheme for superconducting fluxonium qubits that eliminates qubit decay through the control channel by suppressing the environmental density of states at the transition frequency. Adding a low-pass filter on the flux line allows for flux-biasing and, at the same time, coherently controlling the fluxonium qubit by parametrically driving it at integer fractions of its transition frequency. We compare the filtered to the unfiltered configuration and find a 5-times-longer T 1 , and a 10-times-improved T 2 -echo time in the filtered case. We demonstrate coherent control with up to 11-photon subharmonic drives, highlighting the strong nonlinearity of the fluxonium potential. Measured Rabi frequencies and drive-induced frequency shifts show excellent agreement with numerical and analytical models. Furthermore, we show the equivalence of a 3-photon subharmonic drive to an on-resonance drive by benchmarking subharmonic gate fidelities above 99.94%. These results open up a scalable path for full qubit control through a single Purcell-protected channel, providing strong suppression of control-induced decoherence and enabling wiring-efficient superconducting quantum processors.
Abstract Achieving fast gates and long coherence times for superconducting qubits presents challenges, typically requiring either a stronger coupling of the drive line or an excessively strong microwave signal to the qubit. To address this, we introduce on-chip filters of the qubit drive exhibiting a stopband at the qubit frequency, thus enabling long coherence times and strong coupling at the subharmonic frequency, facilitating fast single-qubit gates, and reduced thermal load. The filters exhibit an extrinsic relaxation time of a few seconds while enabling sub-10-ns gates with subharmonic control. Here we show up to 200-fold improvement in the measured relaxation time at the stopband. Furthermore, we implement subharmonic driving of Rabi oscillations with a π pulse duration of 12 ns. Our demonstration of on-chip filters and efficient subharmonic driving in a two-dimensional quantum processor paves the way for a scalable qubit architecture with reduced thermal load and noise from the control line.
Control architectures that reduce hardware overhead while maintaining high-fidelity operations are essential for the continued scaling of superconducting quantum processors. Here we experimentally realize a unified control architecture for fluxonium qubits, in which both transverse (XYXYXY) and longitudinal (ZZZ) operations are implemented through a single flux-control channel driven by a single arbitrary waveform generator channel. This architecture imposes competing requirements on the shared control channel, which must simultaneously support low-frequency flux transmission for reset operations while strongly attenuating broadband noise near the qubit transition frequency. We address this challenge through frequency-selective cryogenic filtering together with compensated waveform synthesis that corrects the pulse distortion introduced by the filtered control line. Experimentally, this approach preserves coherence times above 100 μμμs while enabling active reset with approximately 98% fidelity and 20-ns single-qubit gates with fidelities exceeding 99.99%. We further demonstrate FPGA-native instruction-level waveform synthesis based on reusable pulse primitives for unified flux control. These results establish unified flux control as a scalable architecture for fluxonium qubits that reduces control hardware overhead while preserving high-fidelity operation.
Increasing the fidelity of single-qubit gates requires a combination of faster pulses and increased qubit coherence. However, these requirements can be contradictory. Additionally, increasing the drive power can heat the qubit’s environment and degrade coherence. In this work, we circumvent this issue and achieve rapid gates by pumping a transmon’s native Kerr at approximately one third of the qubit’s resonant frequency. The subharmonic Rabi rate of the process is proportional to applied drive amplitude cubed, allowing for rapid gates. In addition, we demonstrate that filtering can be used to protect the qubit’s coherence while performing rapid gates. Single qubit gates as short as 37.4 ns are demonstrated with fidelity of 99.91%. We present theoretical calculations indicating that drive induced multi-photon decay will not limit qubit lifetime; calculated power absorption also indicates that this technique could reduce cryostat heating for fast gates, a vital requirement for large-scale quantum computers. There is a trade-off between achieving fast qubit control and preserving long qubit lifetimes. In this work, the authors demonstrate single qubit gates by driving a transmon qubit parametrically at 1/3 of its frequency, creating fast, high-fidelity gates while protecting the qubit lifetime and mitigating heating.
Bosonic codes in superconducting resonators are a hardware-efficient avenue for quantum error correction and benefit from the inherent bias toward relaxation errors provided by long-lived cavities compared to typical superconducting qubits. The required coupling to an ancillary control qubit, however, can negate these benefits by inducing highly detrimental effects such as excess decoherence and undesired nonlinearities. This is exemplified by the typically employed transmon qubit that imposes limits on cavity operations due to its finite lifetime as well as the inevitably induced self-Kerr nonlinearity. An important question is thus whether a cavity-qubit coupling can be realized that offers readout and control capabilities without spoiling the cavity. Here, motivated by its long lifetime and design flexibility of its Hamiltonian, we experimentally investigate the fluxonium as a control qubit for superconducting cavities. We couple a fluxonium qubit to a superconducting resonator in the strong-dispersive regime and use it to measure the coherence and flux-tunable inherited nonlinearities of the resonator. We then demonstrate quantum control of the oscillator by preparing and characterizing resonator Fock states and their superpositions, with fidelities limited by resonator decay in our planar prototype device. Finally, we show that the fluxonium can realize cavity-couplings that eliminate undesirable cavity nonlinearities and reach regimes of suppressed self-Kerr that are inaccessible to transmon-based devices. Our results thus demonstrate the potential of the fluxonium as a high-performance bosonic control qubit for superconducting cavities that can outperform existing transmon-based architectures.
Large scale quantum computing motivates the invention of two-qubit gate schemes that not only maximize the gate fidelity but also draw minimal resources. In the case of superconducting qubits, the weak anharmonicity of transmons imposes profound constraints on the gate design, leading to increased complexity of devices and control protocols. Here we demonstrate a resource-efficient control over the interaction of strongly-anharmonic fluxonium qubits. Namely, applying an off-resonant drive to noncomputational transitions in a pair of capacitively-coupled fluxoniums induces a ZZ\text{ZZ}ZZ interaction due to unequal ac Stark shifts of the computational levels. With a continuous choice of frequency and amplitude, the drive can either cancel the static ZZ\text{ZZ}ZZ term or increase it by an order of magnitude to enable a controlled-phase (CP) gate with an arbitrary programmed phase shift. The cross-entropy benchmarking of these non-Clifford operations yields a sub 11%1 error, limited solely by incoherent processes. Our result demonstrates the advantages of strongly-anharmonic circuits over transmons in designing the next generation of quantum processors.
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.