Purcell Effect Limits on the Lifetimes of Transmon Qubits

Jay Gambetta, Alexandre Blais, Lev S. Bishop +1 more

Matthew P. Bland, Faranak Bahrami, Jeronimo G. C. Martinez +14 more

Hilal Ahmad Bhat, Farooq Ahmad Khanday

Superconducting transmon qubits form the backbone of today's leading quantum processors, where high field dispersive readout relies fundamentally on the shape and temporal structure of microwave control pulses. While transmon qubits offer improved robustness against charge noise, their performance is still strongly influenced by environmental coupling, particularly the Purcell effect and by the spectral characteristics of the readout pulses used for state preparation and logic operations. In this study, we present a rigorous comparative analysis of qubit coherence dynamics using measurement under four relevant configurations: a single-step rectangular pulse without Purcell decay, a single-step pulse subject to Purcell-induced relaxation, a two-step shaped pulse without Purcell effects, and a two-step shaped pulse incorporating Purcell decay. By solving the time-dependent Lindblad master equation for a three-level transmon system, we illustrate how readout pulse shaping and Purcell filtering independently and jointly influence qubit population dynamics, excited-state lifetime, and the final-state fidelity. The results demonstrate that two-step readout pulse shaping significantly improves coherence by suppressing overshoot and reducing higher-level population transfer, while the inclusion of Purcell mitigation further stabilizes the dynamics and enhances fidelity. The most notable observation is that the combined application of pulse shaping and Purcell filtering produces the most stable and highest fidelity qubit state discrimination. This unified perspective constitutes the central novelty of our work. Such a comparative framework, integrating pulse engineering with environmental decay modeling, has received limited explicit treatment in prior literature. The findings provide critical insights for optimizing both readout protocols and quantum hardware design in large scale superconducting quantum systems.

Kungang Li, Sudeep Dutta, Rui Zhang +7 more

Kyle Serniak, Greg Calusine, Alexander J. Melville +6 more

Gwanyeol Park, Gahyun Choi, Jisoo Choi +5 more

The remarkable advances of quantum computation technology with superconducting qubits based on circuit quantum electrodynamics (QED) architecture have been achieved by improving control, protection and measurement of the quantum states at the same time. At the heart of all these quantum operations, the significant enhancement of the qubit coherence time during the last decades was the key. Even after all these advances, the coherence and relaxation time of superconducting qubits still requires further improvements toward fault-tolerant quantum computation. Here, we report our observation of a strongly enhanced lifetime of an in-situ tunable superconducting transmon qubit on a silicon substrate that is embedded in a three-dimensional copper cavity. We measured a lifetime of the qubit of up to 84 µs, which is the best reported value of an in-situ tunable transmon on a silicon substrate. In our experiment, the in-situ frequency tunability over a broad range enabled the Purcell factor to be controlled continuously by detuning the qubit frequency against the resonator frequency in the strong dispersive regime. The silicon substrate has its own importance because the substrate should be fully compatible with the conventional semiconductor processes so that scalability and multi-chip module capability are guaranteed. In order to control the Purcell factor with another parameter, we displaced the qubit position in the cavity and observed a longer relaxation time with a smaller coupling coefficient. We believe that this systematic study and the control technique of the Purcell effect in the circuit QED design, together with minimizing the microwave photon loss through an improvement of the fabrication, will contribute to the realization of a practical large-scale quantum computer based on superconducting qubit technology.