We present a superconducting device that realizes the sequential measurement of a transmon qubit. The unitary evolution between system and probe is indeed separated in time and space from the measurement of the probe itself. The device disables common limitations of dispersive readout such as Purcell effect or transients in the cavity mode by tuning the coupling to the measurement channel on demand. The probe is initially stored in a memory mode and coupled to the qubit until a microwave pump releases it into an output line in a characteristic time as low as $10~\mathrm{ns}$, which is 400 times shorter than the memory lifetime. The Wigner function of the memory allows us to characterize the non-Gaussian nature of the probe and its dynamics. A direct measurement of the released probe field quadratures demonstrates a readout fidelity of $97.5~\%$ in a total measurement time of $220~\mathrm{ns}$.
We present a superconducting device that realizes the sequential measurement of a transmon qubit. The unitary evolution between system and probe is indeed separated in time and space from the measurement of the probe itself. The device disables common limitations of dispersive readout such as Purcell effect or transients in the cavity mode by tuning the coupling to the measurement channel on demand. The probe is initially stored in a memory mode and coupled to the qubit until a microwave pump releases it into an output line in a characteristic time as low as 10ns, which is 400 times shorter than the memory lifetime. The Wigner function of the memory allows us to characterize the non-Gaussian nature of the probe and its dynamics. A direct measurement of the released probe field quadratures demonstrates a readout fidelity of 97.5% in a total measurement time of 220ns.
We present a superconducting device that realizes the sequential measurement of a transmon qubit. The device disables common limitations of dispersive readout such as Purcell effect or transients in the cavity mode by turning on and off the coupling to the measurement channel on demand. The qubit measurement begins by loading a readout resonator that is coupled to the qubit. After an optimal interaction time with negligible loss, a microwave pump releases the content of the readout mode by upconversion into a measurement line in a characteristic time as low as 10 ns, which is 400 times shorter than the lifetime of the readout resonator. A direct measurement of the released field quadratures demonstrates a readout fidelity of 97.5% in a total measurement time of 220 ns. The Wigner tomography of the readout mode allows us to characterize the non-Gaussian nature of the readout mode and its dynamics.
The potential of superconducting qubits as the medium for a scalable quantum computer has motivated the pursuit of improved interactions within this system. Two challenges for the field of superconducting qubits are measurement fidelity, to accurately determine the state of the qubit, and the efficient transfer of quantum states. In measurement, the current state-of-the-art method employs dispersive readout, by coupling the qubit to a cavity and reading the resulting shift in cavity frequency to infer the qubit's state; however, this is vulnerable to Purcell relaxation, as well as being modeled off a simplified two-level abstraction of the qubit. In state transfer, the existing proposal for moving quantum states is mostly untested against non-idealities that will likely be present in an experiment. In this dissertation, we examine three problems within these two areas.We first describe a new scheme for fast and high-fidelity dispersive measurement specifically designed to circumvent the Purcell Effect. To do this, the qubit-resonator interaction is turned on only when the resonator is decoupled from the environment; then, after the resonator state has shifted enough to infer the qubit state, the qubit-resonator interaction is turned off before the resonator and environment are recoupled. We also show that the effectiveness of this ``Catch-Disperse-Release'' procedure partly originates from quadrature squeezing of the resonator state induced by the Jaynes-Cummings nonlinearity.The Catch-Disperse-Release measurement scheme treats the qubit as a two-level system, which is a common simplification used in theoretical works. However, the most promising physical candidate for a superconducting qubit, the transmon, is a multi-level system. In the second work, we examine the effects of including the higher energy levels of the transmon. Specifically, we expand the eigenstate picture developed in the first work to encompass multiple qubit levels, and examine the resulting changes to the system. In particular, we analyze the population of the non-target eigenstates as a result of this expanded model, and provide an analytical form for these deviations from the simpler model in Catch-Disperse-Release (i.e., the dressed state approximation).Lastly, we assess the robustness of the existing quantum state transfer protocol, testing its performance under typical experimental deviations from the ideal case. We show that the procedure is resilient to almost all non-idealities, except frequency mismatch between the two cavities. We also demonstrate a method to compensate for one such error in frequency-matching.
We analyze a single-shot readout for superconducting qubits via the controlled catch, dispersion, and release of a microwave field. A tunable coupler is used to decouple the microwave resonator from the transmission line during the dispersive qubit-resonator interaction, thus circumventing damping from the Purcell effect. We show that, if the qubit frequency tuning is sufficiently adiabatic, a fast high-fidelity qubit readout is possible, even in the strongly nonlinear dispersive regime. Interestingly, the Jaynes-Cummings nonlinearity leads to the quadrature squeezing of the resonator field below the standard quantum limit, resulting in a significant decrease of the measurement error.
Dispersive readout, the current standard for measuring superconducting qubits, relies on relatively easy to engineer, static transverse coupling between a qubit and a detuned cavity mode. However, this method requires circuit design trade-offs between qubit-cavity coupling, cavity-feedline coupling, detuning, and the resultant decoherence introduced by the cavity mode. Additionally, the criteria for performing quantum nondemolition measurements, including reduced cavity photon numbers, further limits speed and fidelity. In this work, we introduce a circuit with pulse-tunable qubit-cavity and cavity-feedline couplings so that the entire qubit-measurement process can be fully optimized. Here, the core measurement process resembles a quantum gate operation between the qubit and the cavity, with the cavity acting like an ancilla, storing the qubit-state information. To fully explore time-dependent effects of the full qubit-cavity dynamics, we go beyond the rotating-wave, Jaynes-Cummings, or dispersive approximations, to develop a pulsed-measurement protocol. In addition, we propose a realistic circuit architecture that can provide a very fast, high-fidelity, QND measurement with near-unit efficiency.
Superconducting 3D microwave cavities offer state-of-the-art coherence times and a well-controlled environment for superconducting qubits. In order to realize at the same time fast readout and long-lived quantum information storage, one can couple the qubit to both a low-quality readout and a high-quality storage cavity. However, such systems are bulky compared to their less coherent 2D counterparts. A more compact and scalable approach is achieved by making use of the multimode structure of a 3D cavity. In our work, we investigate such a device where a transmon qubit is capacitively coupled to two modes of a single 3D cavity. External coupling is engineered so that the memory mode has an about 100 times larger quality factor than the readout mode. Using an all-microwave second-order protocol, we realize a lifetime enhancement of the stored state over the qubit lifetime by a factor of 6 with a fidelity of approximately 80% determined via quantum process tomography. We also find that this enhancement is not limited by fundamental constraints.
Fast and high-fidelity qubit measurement plays a key role in quantum error correction. In superconducting qubits, measurement is typically performed using a resonant microwave drive on a readout resonator dispersively coupled to the qubit. Shorter measurement times require larger numbers of photons populating the readout resonator, which ultimately leads to undesired measurementinduced state transitions (MIST) of the qubit. MIST can be particularly problematic because these transitions often leave the qubit in a high energy state, and the MIST locations in readout parameter space drift as a function of qubit offset charge. In transmon qubits, these drifts have been avoided using very large qubit-resonator detunings or dedicated offset charge biases. In this work, we take an alternative approach and add an inductive shunt to the transmon to eliminate the offset charge dependence and stabilize the MIST. We experimentally characterize MIST in several different inductively-shunted transmons, in agreement with quantum and semiclassical models for MIST. These results extend to other inductively-shunted qubits.