We study parametric oscillations of two capacitively coupled Kerr parametric oscillators (KPOs) with frequency-chirped two- and one-photon drives. The two-KPO system adiabatically evolves from the initial vacuum state to an oscillation state corresponding to a solution state in quantum-annealing applications. Frequency chirping dynamically changes the detuning between resonance and oscillation frequencies during parametric modulation and reduces unwanted population transfer to excited states caused by pure dephasing and photon loss. We observe that frequency chirping increases the success probability to obtain the solution state and that simulations taking into account pure dephasing reproduce experiments with and without frequency chirping. This study demonstrates the effectiveness and applicability of frequency chirping to a KPO-based quantum annealer.
We study parametric oscillations of two capacitively coupled Kerr parametric oscillators (KPOs) with frequency-chirped two- and one-photon drives. The two-KPO system adiabatically evolves from the initial vacuum state to an oscillation state corresponding to a solution state in quantum-annealing applications. Frequency chirping dynamically changes the detuning between resonance and oscillation frequencies during parametric modulation and reduces unwanted population transfer to excited states caused by pure dephasing and photon loss. We observe that frequency chirping increases the success probability to obtain the solution state and that simulations taking into account pure dephasing reproduce experiments with and without frequency chirping. This study demonstrates the effectiveness and applicability of frequency chirping to a KPO-based quantum annealer.
Kerr parametric oscillators (KPOs), which can be implemented with superconducting parametrons possessing large Kerr nonlinearity, have been attracting much attention in terms of their applications to quantum annealing, universal quantum computation, and studies of quantum many-body systems. It is of practical importance for these studies to realize fast and accurate tunable coupling between KPOs in a simple manner. We develop a simple scheme of fast tunable coupling of KPOs with high tunability in speed and amplitude using the fast transitionless rotation of a KPO in the phase space based on the shortcuts to adiabaticity. Our scheme enables rapid switching of the effective coupling between KPOs, and can be implemented with always-on linear coupling between KPOs, by controlling the phase of the pump field and the resonance frequency of the KPO without controlling the amplitude of the pump field nor using additional drive fields and couplers. We apply the coupling scheme to a two-qubit gate, and show that our scheme realizes high gate fidelity compared with a purely adiabatic one, by mitigating undesired nonadiabatic transitions.
A method of quantum annealing (QA) using Kerr-nonlinear parametric oscillators (KPOs) was proposed. This method is described by bosonic operators and has different characteristics from QA based on the transverse-field Ising model. As the first step to describe this method in the conventional framework of QA, we propose effective spin models of KPOs. The spin models are obtained via a variant of the Holstein-Primakoff transformation and are described by spin-s operators. The terms for detuning, coherent driving, parametric driving, and the Kerr effect are mapped to the transverse field, longitudinal field, and nonlinear terms for the z and x components of spins, respectively. By analyzing the spin models corresponding to KPOs in several settings, we demonstrate that the present spin models for a rather large s and tuned parameters qualitatively reproduce the behavior of KPOs.
Quantum annealing (QA) is an algorithm to find the ground state of the problem Hamiltonian by using an adiabatic time evolution. An approach to evaluate adiabaticity in the experiment by applying spectroscopic techniques has recently been suggested. However, this method requires temporal oscillation of interaction strength during QA, posing challenges for experimental demonstration. Here, we propose an experimental method for evaluating adiabaticity when performing QA with a parametric oscillator with Kerr nonlinearity (KPO). Importantly, our proposal offers a significant advantage by eliminating the need for temporal oscillation of interactions during QA. We investigate its performance through numerical simulations, and we show the feasibility of our method.
We study simultaneous parametric oscillations in a system composed of two distributed-element-circuit Josephson parametric oscillators in the single-photon Kerr regime coupled via a static capacitance. The energy of the system is described by a two-bit Ising Hamiltonian with an effective coupling whose amplitude and sign depend on the relative phase between parametric pumps. We demonstrate that the binary phases of the parametric oscillations are correlated with each other, and that the parity and strength of the correlation can be controlled by adjusting the pump phase. The observed correlation is reproduced in our simulation taking pure dephasing into account. The present result demonstrates the tunability of the Hamiltonian parameters by the phase of external microwave, which can be used in the Ising machine hardware composed of the Kerr parametric oscillator network.
We experimentally investigate how interactions between Kerr parametric oscillators (KPOs) degrade their bit-flip times, where a bit flip is defined as a transition between the two degenerate ground states of a KPO. Interactions between KPOs cause quantum states of KPOs to leak outside the computational subspace, leading to bit flips. Bit flips degrade fidelity and pose a significant problem for KPO-based quantum information processing. We performed an experiment in which a weak microwave signal is injected into one KPO to emulate photon injection from another KPO, and find that the bit-flip time decreases by an order of magnitude due to induced excitations, depending on the frequency and power of the injected signal. Methods to mitigate the decrease in bit-flip times caused by interactions between KPOs are discussed, including adjusting the pump frequencies, coherent-state amplitudes, and couplings between KPOs. These findings provide valuable insights for scaling up KPO-based quantum computers.
Kerr parametric oscillators (KPOs), two-photon driven Kerr-nonlinear resonators, can stably hold coherent states with opposite-sign amplitudes and are promising devices for quantum computing. Recently, we have theoretically proposed a two-qubit gate Rzz for highly detuned KPOs and called it a conditional-driving gate [Chono et al., Phys. Rev. Res. 4, 043054 (2022)]. In this study, analyzing its superconducting-circuit model and deriving a corresponding static model, we find that an AC-Zeeman shift due to the flux pulse for the gate operation largely affects the gate performance. This effect becomes a more aggravating factor with shorter gate times, leading to an increase in the error rate. We thus propose a method to cancel this undesirable effect. Furthermore, through the use of shortcuts to adiabaticity and the optimization of flux pulses, we numerically demonstrate a conditional-driving gate with average fidelity exceeding 99.9% twice faster than that without the proposed cancellation method and the shortcuts to adiabaticity.