Qubit Dynamics in the Presence of Classical and Quantum Environment due to Two-Level Systems

Sahel Ashhab, J. R. Johansson, Franco Nori

Madita Willsch, Dennis Willsch, Fengping Jin +2 more

The real-time flux dynamics of up to three superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) are studied by numerically solving the time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation. The numerical results are used to scrutinize the mapping of the flux degrees of freedom onto two-level systems (the qubits) as well as the performance of the intermediate SQUID as a tunable coupling element. It is shown that the qubit representation yields a good description of the flux dynamics during quantum annealing and the presence of the tunable coupling element does not have negative effects on the overall performance. Additionally, data obtained from a simulation of the dynamics of two-level systems during quantum annealing are compared to experimental data produced by the D-Wave 2000Q quantum annealer. The effects of finite temperature are incorporated in the simulation by coupling the qubit system to a bath of two-level systems. It is shown that an environment modeled as noninteracting two-level systems coupled to the qubits can produce data which matches the experimental data much better than the simulation data of the qubits without coupling to an environment and better than data obtained from a simulation of an environment modeled as interacting two-level systems coupling to the qubits.

Adam Zaman Chaudhry, Jiangbin Gong

It is not always justified to model the environment of a realistic quantum system as a collection of harmonic oscillators or two-level systems. To explore interesting physics associated with a composite environment, here we study the dynamics of a qubit coupled to a second two-level system, which is in turn coupled to a harmonic-oscillator bath. That is, the qubit of interest is in the presence of a composite environment consisting of the second two-level system and a conventional harmonic-oscillator bath. We investigate the issue of pointer states of decoherence for the qubit for different coupling strengths between the qubit and such a composite environment. It is shown that for weak-, intermediate-, or strong-coupling strengths, the qubit's reduced density matrix has a coupling-strength-dependent diagonal representation, thus yielding coupling-strength-dependent computational pointer states. Interestingly, the associated decoherence rate can decrease as the coupling strength increases.

J. R. Guimarães, Y. Liu, Y. Gao +10 more

Understanding the qubit environment is central to fault-tolerant superconducting quantum computation. Characterization typically relies on relaxation, leaving excitation largely underexplored. Here, we access this information with time-resolved broadband excitation spectroscopy. The resulting qubit excitation spectrum reveals a highly structured landscape, interspersed with cold regions. Combined with postselection, this technique enables full reconstruction of the noise power spectral density (PSD) and separates quantum from classical noise. With feed-forward, it exposes long-lived two-level-systems (TLSs), whose relaxation times span tens of microseconds to milliseconds - uncovering an intrinsic link between the qubit-TLS coupling and TLS relaxation. The data suggest that the long-lived TLSs are intrinsic to the qubit environment, and can cause excitation that lasts for many qubit operation cycles. Consequently, the environment retains a memory of prior dynamics, and properties like gate fidelity become non-Markovian and protocol-dependent. The presented approach enables identifying and bypassing the hidden roadblocks formed by long-lived TLSs in fault-tolerant quantum computation.

M. Kira, S. W. Koch

M. Mahdian, Hadi Mehrabpour