Progress and Challenges for Engineering Superconducting Qubits

Damon S. Russell, Jean-Philip Paquette, Mehrnoosh Vahidpour +2 more

Andrew J. Kerman, William D. Oliver, Vladimir Bolkhovsky +1 more

Benjamin Lienhard, Jochen Braumüller, Wayne H. Woods +8 more

Over the past two decades, the performance of superconducting quantum circuits has tremendously improved. The progress of superconducting qubits enabled a new industry branch to emerge from global technology enterprises to quantum computing startups. Here, an overview of superconducting quantum circuit microwave control is presented. Furthermore, we discuss one of the persistent engineering challenges in the field—how to control the electromagnetic environment of increasingly complex superconducting circuits such that they are simultaneously protected and efficiently controllable.

Kouichi Semba

Trevor McCourt

Significant progress is required in the engineering of large, interacting quantum systems in order to realize the promises of gate-model quantum computing. Designing such systems is challenging, as the dynamics of continuous variable quantum systems are generally unintuitive, and brute-force numerical solutions are difficult to impossible in more than a few dimensions. In this work, I draw analogies between modern superconducting qubits and mechanical mass-spring systems in attempt to gain a simple intuition for what makes each design special. In particular, I analyze superconducting qubits that are inherently protected from noise, and connect this protection to features of the corresponding mechanical system. The hope is that intuition gained from analyzing these systems mechanically will allow for intuitive design of useful superconducting circuits in the future.

Matthias Steffen