Abstract : This technical report presents simulation and experimental hardware development of pulsed modulated microwave/radio frequency electronic control circuitry for control of electron/nuclear spin states of qubits/quantum memory applicable to semiconductor, superconductor, ionic and superconductor-ionic hybrid technologies. As the pulse quality and need for development of single pulses with very high quality will impact directly the coherence time of the qubit/memory, we present as an example the integration of cryogenic superconductor components including filters and amplifiers to improve the pulse quality and validate the approach. Control of qubits/quantum memory using this technology will be subject of future report.
Abstract : This technical report presents simulation and experimental hardware development of pulsed modulated microwave/radio frequency electronic control circuitry for control of electron/nuclear spin states of qubits/quantum memory applicable to semiconductor, superconductor, ionic and superconductor-ionic hybrid technologies. As the pulse quality and need for development of single pulses with very high quality will impact directly the coherence time of the qubit/memory, we present as an example the integration of cryogenic superconductor components including filters and amplifiers to improve the pulse quality and validate the approach. Control of qubits/quantum memory using this technology will be subject of future report.
This thesis addresses challenges in the experimental realisation of optical quantum computing with atom-cavity platforms and develops techniques for experimental quantum control that generalise across a range of quantum modalities. Within the framework of cavity quantum electrodynamics (cQED), methods are developed and numerically validated for fast and precise control of single atoms to generate photonic states of interest. In particular, we consider the generation of high-repetition-rate n-photon bursts and time-bin entangled states. These photonic resources are essential for applications such as boson sampling, multi-photon interference, optical quantum computing, and quantum-enhanced metrology. Experimental improvements in coherent population transfer are demonstrated using adaptive pulse shaping with acousto-optic modulators. Beyond photon generation, the thesis introduces general-purpose pulse-level techniques, including pulse distortion correction, memory-efficient pulse compression, and machine learning-based optimisation. These methods are shown to be transferable to other platforms, such as neutral atom arrays and superconducting qubits. A particular contribution is the implementation of scalable pulse generation using fixed-point compressed pulse representations on FPGA hardware, achieving substantial memory savings while maintaining high fidelity in simulations of quantum operations. Additionally, reinforcement learning is presented as a powerful tool for optimising complex quantum dynamics, with state-of-the-art results demonstrated across various simulated systems. Throughout the thesis, theoretical developments are supported by numerical simulations and partial experimental validation, providing important insights for the development of future quantum technologies.
Abstract : As classical computers begin to reach their fundamental performance limits, quantum computers will be an invaluable tool for the advance of science and technology. The trillion dollar silicon electronics industry sets the perfect stage for the evolution of quantum computation, yet it has so far proved to be a tough challenge to implement all the elements needed to build a scalable quantum computer in silicon. This thesis presents the first experimental demonstration of the full operation of single-spin qubits in Si. Our qubits consist of the electron and nuclear spins of a single phosphorus atom, implanted in a Si substrate, and controlled by a gated nanostructure. We describe an experimental setup tailored to minimise electron temperature and perform realtime data acquisition, analysis and instrument control. We present modeling, simulation and characterisation of a novel nanoscale coplanar antenna for spin control, designed to work at frequencies up to 50 GHz. These tools have allowed us to demonstrate the first ever single-atom spin-qubits in natural silicon, leading the way to demonstrating record qubit performances in isotopically purified 28Si: an electron spin qubit with measurement and control fidelities 97% and coherence times of 0.5 seconds; and a nuclear spin qubit with fidelities 99.99% and a record single-spin coherence of 30 s. We have performed noise spectroscopy in our system and concluded that decoherence is currently limited by magnetic noise originating from our broadband antenna.
Abstract : Artificial two-level quantum systems are widely investigated as the fundamental building blocks of future quantum computers. These quantum bits (qubits) can be realized in many solid state systems, including Josephson junction based devices, nitrogen vacancy centers in diamond, and electron spins in semiconductor quantum dots. Among these systems, Si is very promising since it can be isotopically purified to eliminate random fluctuating hyperfine fields from lattice nuclei, leading to ultra-long quantum coherence times. However, lower heterostructure quality, higher electron effective mass and valley degeneracy present many challenges in realizing high quality qubits in Si. This thesis demonstrates consistent realization of robust single-electron silicon qubits with high yield. With optimized device designs and DC/RF measurement techniques developed at Petta lab in Princeton University, we have achieved versatile quantum control of a single electron, as well as sensitive read-out of its quantum state. By applying microwave radiation to the gate electrodes, we can probe the energy level structure of the system with 1 mu-eV resolution. We apply bursts of microwave radiation to extract the qubit lifetime, T1 . By experimentally tuning the qubit, we demonstrate a four order of magnitude variation of T1 with gate voltage. We show that our experimental results are consistent with a theory that takes into account phonon-mediated charge relaxation.
Compared to traditional semiconductor control electronics (TSCE) located at room temperature, cryogenic single flux quantum (SFQ) electronics can provide qubit measurement and control alternatives that address critical issues related to scalability of cryogenic quantum processors. Single-qubit control and readout have been demonstrated recently using SFQ circuits coupled to superconducting qubits. Experiments where the SFQ electronics are co-located with the qubit have suffered from excess decoherence and loss due to quasiparticle poisoning of the qubit. A previous experiment by our group showed that moving the control electronics to the 3 K stage of the dilution refrigerator avoided this source of decoherence in a high-coherence 3D transmon geometry. In this paper, we also generate the pulses at the 3 K stage but have optimized the qubit design and control lines for scalable 2D transmon devices. We directly compare the qubit lifetime T1, coherence time T2∗ and gate fidelity when the qubit is controlled by the Josephson pulse generator (JPG) circuit versus the TSCE setup. We find agreement to within the daily fluctuations for T1 and T2∗, and agreement to within 10% for randomized benchmarking. We also performed interleaved randomized benchmarking on individual JPG gates demonstrating an average error per gate of 0.46% showing good agreement with what is expected based on the qubit coherence and higher-state leakage. These results are an order of magnitude improvement in gate fidelity over our previous work and demonstrate that a Josephson microwave source operated at 3 K is a promising component for scalable qubit control.
Quantum computing promises exponential speed-up in solving certain complex problems that would be intractable by classical computers. However, thousands or millions of qubits might be required to solve useful problems. High-precision and low-noise electrical signals are required to manipulate and read the state of a qubit and to control qubit-to-qubit interactions. Current systems use room temperature electronics with many coax cables routed to the qubit chip inside a dilution refrigerator. This approach does not scale to large number of qubits, due to form factor, cost, power consumption and thermal load to the fridge. To address this challenge, a cryogenic qubit controller has been proposed [1]. The first integrated implementation of a cryogenic pulse modulator has been presented in [2], demonstrating the capability of manipulating (drive) the state of superconducting qubits. The work in [3] extends the capability of the controller with 3 main features: frequency-multiplexing to reduce the number of RF cables per qubit, an arbitrary I/Q pulse generation for improved control fidelity and a digitally-intensive architecture with integrated instruction set to enable integration in existing quantum control stacks. This work further advances the prior art by integrating the capability of reading the qubit state and generating the voltage pulses required for drive, readout, 2-qubit operations and qubit characterization. The SoC can drive up to 16 spin qubits by frequency multiplexing over a single RF line, read the state of up to 6 qubits simultaneously and control up to 22 gate potentials. The SoC also integrates a μ-controller for increased flexibility in implementing the control instruction set. The proposed cryogenic controller can replace all the high-speed control electronics used in conventional solutions today, paving the way towards scalable quantum computers.
A quantum memory at microwave frequencies, able to store the state of multiple superconducting qubits for long times, is a key element for quantum information processing. Electronic and nuclear spins are natural candidates for the storage medium as their coherence time can be well above one second. Benefiting from these long coherence times requires to apply the refocusing techniques used in magnetic resonance, a major challenge in the context of hybrid quantum circuits. Here we report the first implementation of such a scheme, using ensembles of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centres in diamond coupled to a superconducting resonator, in a setup compatible with superconducting qubit technology. We implement the active reset of the NV spins into their ground state by optical pumping and their refocusing by Hahn echo sequences. This enables the storage of multiple microwave pulses at the picoWatt level and their retrieval after up to 35μs, a three orders of magnitude improvement compared to previous experiments.