Generating high-fidelity, tunable entanglement between qubits is crucial for realizing gate-based quantum computation. In superconducting circuits, tunable interactions are often implemented using flux-tunable qubits or coupling elements, adding control complexity and noise sources. Here, we realize a tunable
ZZ interaction between two transmon qubits with fixed frequencies and fixed coupling, induced by driving both transmons off-resonantly. We show tunable coupling over one order of magnitude larger than the static coupling, and change the sign of the interaction, enabling cancellation of the idle coupling. Further, this interaction is amenable to large quantum processors: the drive frequency can be flexibly chosen to avoid spurious transitions, and because both transmons are driven, it is resilient to microwave crosstalk. We apply this interaction to implement a controlled phase (CZ) gate with a gate fidelity of
99.43(1)% as measured by cycle benchmarking, and we find the fidelity is limited by incoherent errors.
A central challenge in building a scalable quantum computer with superconducting qubits is the execution of high-fidelity two-qubit gates in the presence of many resonant elements. As more elements are added to the architecture, and as the multiplicity of their couplings grows, the design's frequency space becomes crowded, and performance suffers. The authors present a way to address this difficulty: selective activation of interactions between transmon qubits of fixed frequency and those of tunable frequency. This activation depends on both the amplitude and frequency of modulation, and using the amplitude as an additional condition for resonance alleviates frequency crowding.