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arXiv:2504.13718 · Physical Review Applied

Fast microwave-driven two-qubit gates between fluxonium qubits with a transmon coupler

Siddharth Singh, Eugene Y. Huang, Jinlun Hu, Figen Yilmaz, Martijn F. S. Zwanenburg, Piranavan Kumaravadivel, Siyu Wang, Taryn V. Stefanski, Christian Kraglund Andersen

Published Oct 28, 2025• 5 citations
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Abstract

Two qubit gates constitute fundamental building blocks in the realization of large-scale quantum devices. Using superconducting circuits, two-qubit gates have previously been implemented in different ways with each method aiming to maximize gate fidelity. Another important goal of a new gate scheme is to minimize the complexity of gate calibration. In this work, we demonstrate a high-fidelity two-qubit gate between two fluxonium qubits enabled by an intermediate capacitively coupled transmon. The coupling strengths between the qubits and the coupler are designed to minimize residual crosstalk while still allowing for fast gate operations. The gate is based on frequency selectively exciting the coupler using a microwave drive to complete a 2$π$ rotation, conditional on the state of the fluxonium qubits. When successful, this drive scheme implements a conditional phase gate. Using analytically derived pulse shapes, we minimize unwanted excitations of the coupler and obtain gate errors of $10^{-2}$ for gate times below 60~ns. At longer durations, our gate is limited by relaxation of the coupler. Our results show how carefully designed control pulses can speed up frequency selective entangling gates.

DOI
10.1103/yxf3-jtx5

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Two qubit gates constitute fundamental building blocks in the realization of large-scale quantum devices. Using superconducting circuits, two-qubit gates have previously been implemented in different ways with each method aiming to maximize gate fidelity. Another important goal of a new gate scheme is to minimize the complexity of gate calibration. In this work, we demonstrate a high-fidelity two-qubit gate between two fluxonium qubits enabled by an intermediate capacitively coupled transmon. The coupling strengths between the qubits and the coupler are designed to minimize residual crosstalk while still allowing for fast gate operations. The gate is based on frequency selectively exciting the coupler using a microwave drive to complete a 2πππ rotation, conditional on the state of the fluxonium qubits. When successful, this drive scheme implements a conditional phase gate. Using analytically derived pulse shapes, we minimize unwanted excitations of the coupler and obtain gate errors of 10−210^{-2}10−2 for gate times below 60~ns. At longer durations, our gate is limited by relaxation of the coupler. Our results show how carefully designed control pulses can speed up frequency selective entangling gates.
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In recent years, several architectures have been proposed for implementing two-qubit operations on fluxonium superconducting qubits. A particularly promising approach, which was demonstrated experimentally by Refs. [1,2], employs a transmon superconducting qubit as a tunable coupler between the fluxonium qubits. These experiments have shown that the transmon coupler enables fast, high-fidelity two-qubit operations while suppressing unwanted ZZ crosstalk between the fluxonium qubits. In this work, we numerically study the scalability of this architecture. We find that, when trivially scaling this architecture, crosstalk from spectator qubits limits the gate fidelity to below 90%. We show that these spectator errors can be reduced to below 10−410^{-4}10−4 by reducing the coupling strength and by dynamically tuning transmons that are not used for a two-qubit operation to an off position. We further investigate the resilience of the operation to direct capacitive coupling between the transmon couplers and to microwave crosstalk.
We demonstrate a controlled-Z gate between capacitively coupled fluxonium qubits with transition frequencies 72.3 MHz72.3~\textrm{MHz}72.3 MHz and 136.3 MHz136.3~\textrm{MHz}136.3 MHz. The gate is activated by a 61.6 ns61.6~\textrm{ns}61.6 ns long pulse at the frequency between non-computational transitions ∣10⟩−∣20⟩|10\rangle - |20\rangle∣10⟩−∣20⟩ and ∣11⟩−∣21⟩|11\rangle - |21\rangle∣11⟩−∣21⟩, during which the qubits complete only 444 and 888 Larmor periods, respectively. The measured gate error of (8±1)×10−3(8\pm1)\times 10^{-3}(8±1)×10−3 is limited by decoherence in the non-computational subspace, which will likely improve in the next generation devices. Although our qubits are about fifty times slower than transmons, the two-qubit gate is faster than microwave-activated gates on transmons, and the gate error is on par with the lowest reported. Architectural advantages of low-frequency fluxoniums include long qubit coherence time, weak hybridization in the computational subspace, suppressed residual ZZZZZZ-coupling rate (here 46 kHz46~\mathrm{kHz}46 kHz), and absence of either excessive parameter matching or complex pulse shaping requirements.
Although single- and two-qubit gates are sufficient for universal quantum computation, single-shot three-qubit gates greatly simplify quantum error correction schemes and algorithms. We design fast, high-fidelity three-qubit entangling gates based on microwave pulses for transmon qubits coupled through a superconducting resonator. We show that when interqubit frequency differences are comparable to single-qubit anharmonicities, errors occur primarily through a single unwanted transition. This feature enables the design of fast three-qubit gates based on simple analytical pulse shapes that are engineered to minimize such errors. We show that a three-qubit ccz gate can be performed in 260 ns with fidelities exceeding 99.3899.38%99.38, or 99.9999.99%99.99 with numerical optimization.
Tunable couplers have recently become one of the most powerful tools for implementing two-qubit gates between superconducting qubits.A tunable coupler typically includes a nonlinear element, such as a superconducting quantum interference device, which is used to tune the resonance frequency of an LC circuit connecting two qubits.Here we propose a complimentary approach where instead of tuning the resonance frequency of the tunable coupler by applying a quasistatic control signal, we excite by microwave the degree of freedom associated with the coupler itself.Because of strong effective longitudinal coupling between the coupler and the qubits, the frequency of this transition strongly depends on the computational state, leading to different phase accumulations in different states.Using this method, we experimentally demonstrate a controlled-Z gate of 44-ns duration on a fluxonium-based quantum processor, obtaining a fidelity of 97.6% ± 0.4% characterized by cross-entropy benchmarking.