Simulation of a tunable coupler for implementing two-qubit gates between transmon qubits

David C. McKay, Stefan Filipp, Antonio Mezzacapo +3 more

Michele C. Collodo, J. Herrmann, Ants Remm +5 more

Yu Feng Zhang, Lian-Lian Zhang, Shuang Xu

Abstract Inductively shunted transmon qubits(IST) have emerged as one of the most promising candidates for superconducting quantum computing, exhibiting remarkable resilience to both charge and flux noise as a qubit. In this work, we investigate, analytically and numerically, the potential of the IST as a coupler. Compared to the conventional transmon couplers, significant advantages due to the addition of an inductive shunt is revealed, and the unique flux-tunability makes it an ideal candidate for implementing coupling between two transmons. Moreover, a novel coupling circuit is investigated through numerical simulations, demonstrates high-contrast switching of qubit–qubit interactions under the control of an external flux, realizing a two-qubit controlled-Z (CZ) gate with an average fidelity above 99.99%.

Hayato Goto

Tunable couplers, which turn on and off the interaction between qubits, have emerged as a key means to achieve low error rates in superconducting quantum computers. Conventional devices using one transmon qubit exhibit unwanted residual coupling, though, especially at the high detuning that is desirable for suppressing crosstalk errors. To solve this critical problem, the author proposes a tunable coupler based on two transmons that satisfies the ideal conditions of no residual coupling and fast two-qubit gate operations at high detuning. This double-transmon coupler is expected to become standard for superconducting architectures by eliminating unwanted coupling during idle time.

Kentaro Kubo, Yinghao Ho, Hayato Goto

Tunable couplers in superconducting quantum computers have enabled fast and accurate two-qubit gates, with reported high fidelities over 99% in various architectures and gate-implementation schemes. However, there are few tunable couplers whose performance in multiqubit systems is clarified, except for the most widely used one: single-transmon coupler (STC). Achieving similar accuracy to isolated two-qubit systems remains challenging due to various undesirable couplings but is necessary for scalability. In this work, we numerically analyze a system of three fixed-frequency qubits coupled via two double-transmon couplers (DTCs) where nearest-neighbor qubits are highly detuned and also next-nearest-neighbor ones are nearly resonant. The DTC is a recently proposed tunable coupler, which consists of two fixed-frequency transmons coupled through a common loop with an additional Josephson junction. We find that the DTC cannot only reduce undesired residual couplings sufficiently, as well as in isolated two-qubit systems, but also enables implementations of 30-ns CZ gates and individual and simultaneous 10-ns π / 2 pulses with fidelities over 99.99%. For comparison, we also investigate the system where the DTCs are replaced by the STCs. The results show that the DTC outperforms the STC in terms of both residual coupling suppression and gate accuracy in the above systems. From these results, we expect that the DTC architecture is promising for realizing high-performance, scalable superconducting quantum computers. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Martijn F. S. Zwanenburg, Christian Kraglund Andersen

In recent years, several architectures have been proposed for implementing two-qubit operations on fluxonium superconducting qubits. A particularly promising approach, which was demonstrated experimentally by Refs. [1,2], employs a transmon superconducting qubit as a tunable coupler between the fluxonium qubits. These experiments have shown that the transmon coupler enables fast, high-fidelity two-qubit operations while suppressing unwanted ZZ crosstalk between the fluxonium qubits. In this work, we numerically study the scalability of this architecture. We find that, when trivially scaling this architecture, crosstalk from spectator qubits limits the gate fidelity to below 90%. We show that these spectator errors can be reduced to below $10^{-4}$ by reducing the coupling strength and by dynamically tuning transmons that are not used for a two-qubit operation to an off position. We further investigate the resilience of the operation to direct capacitive coupling between the transmon couplers and to microwave crosstalk.