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Breaking the trade-off between fast control and long lifetime of a superconducting qubit

Shingo Kono, Kazuki Koshino, Dany Lachance-Quirion, Arjan F. van Loo, Yutaka Tabuchi, Atsushi Noguchi, Yasunobu Nakamura

Published Jan 1, 2020• 23 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

Abstract The rapid development in designs and fabrication techniques of superconducting qubits has made coherence times of qubits longer. In the future, however, the radiative decay of a qubit into its control line will be a fundamental limitation, imposing a trade-off between fast control and long lifetime of the qubit. Here, we break this trade-off by strongly coupling another superconducting qubit along the control line. This second qubit, which we call “Josephson quantum filter” (JQF), prevents the first qubit from emitting microwave photons and thus suppresses its relaxation, while transmitting large-amplitude control microwave pulses due to the saturation of the quantum filter, enabling fast qubit control. This device functions as an automatic decoupler between a qubit and its control line and could help in the realization of a large-scale superconducting quantum processor by reducing the heating of the qubit environment and the crosstalk between qubits.

Related papers

Breaking the trade-off between fast control and long lifetime of a superconducting qubit

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The rapid development in designs and fabrication techniques of superconducting qubits has made coherence times of qubits longer. In the future, however, the radiative decay of a qubit into its control line will be a fundamental limitation, imposing a trade-off between fast control and long lifetime of the qubit. Here, we break this trade-off by strongly coupling another superconducting qubit along the control line. This second qubit, which we call "Josephson quantum filter" (JQF), prevents the first qubit from emitting microwave photons and thus suppresses its relaxation, while transmitting large-amplitude control microwave pulses due to the saturation of the quantum filter, enabling fast qubit control. This device functions as an automatic decoupler between a qubit and its control line and could help in the realization of a large-scale superconducting quantum processor by reducing the heating of the qubit environment and the crosstalk between qubits.

arXiv:2002.01635•Nature Communications•Jul 23, 2020•28 citations

Decay-protected superconducting qubit with fast control enabled by integrated on-chip filters

Aashish Sah, Suman Kundu, Heikki Suominen +2 more

Abstract Achieving fast gates and long coherence times for superconducting qubits presents challenges, typically requiring either a stronger coupling of the drive line or an excessively strong microwave signal to the qubit. To address this, we introduce on-chip filters of the qubit drive exhibiting a stopband at the qubit frequency, thus enabling long coherence times and strong coupling at the subharmonic frequency, facilitating fast single-qubit gates, and reduced thermal load. The filters exhibit an extrinsic relaxation time of a few seconds while enabling sub-10-ns gates with subharmonic control. Here we show up to 200-fold improvement in the measured relaxation time at the stopband. Furthermore, we implement subharmonic driving of Rabi oscillations with a π pulse duration of 12 ns. Our demonstration of on-chip filters and efficient subharmonic driving in a two-dimensional quantum processor paves the way for a scalable qubit architecture with reduced thermal load and noise from the control line.

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Protection of a Qubit via Subradiance: A Josephson Quantum Filter

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The coupling between a superconducting qubit and a control line inevitably results in radiative decay of the qubit into the line. We propose a Josephson quantum filter (JQF), which protects the data qubit (DQ) from radiative decay through the control line without reducing the gate speed on the DQ. The JQF consists of a qubit strongly coupled to the control line of the DQ and its working principle is a subradiance effect that is characteristic of waveguide quantum electrodynamics setups. The JQF is a passive circuit element and is therefore suitable for integration in a scalable superconducting qubit system.

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Rapid reset and readout of qubit states are essential for quantum error correction, yet accelerating these operations through stronger coupling to a dissipative environment inevitably increases qubit decay via the Purcell effect. Here we present a broadband Purcell filter that decouples the reset and readout paths, enabling both operations to be independently optimized without compromising qubit coherence. The filter employs two engineered notches - an intrinsic notch and a bandstop notch - to provide broadband Purcell protection, together with an additional reset stub that creates a reset mode below the protected band. To enable fast reset while suppressing filter-mediated interactions between qubits, we couple each qubit to a dedicated reset resonator. We experimentally demonstrate Purcell-limited relaxation times exceeding 1 ms across a 1.2 GHz bandwidth, simultaneously with 500 ns readout without a Josephson parametric amplifier and 100 ns reset with 99.6% efficiency. The reset resonator is designed with a deliberate kappa-chi mismatch, which suppresses photon-shot-noise-induced dephasing by a factor of 70 compared to the readout resonator. Our work provides a scalable hardware solution that resolves the traditional trade-off between fast qubit operations and qubit protection, advancing the prospects for fault-tolerant quantum computing.

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Reducing Spontaneous Emission in Circuit Quantum Electrodynamics by a Combined Readout/Filter Technique

Nicholas T. Bronn, Easwar Magesan, Nicholas A. Masluk +3 more

Physical implementations of qubits can be extremely sensitive to environmental coupling, which can result in decoherence. While efforts are made for protection, coupling to the environment is necessary to measure and manipulate the state of the qubit. As such, the goal of having long qubit energy relaxation times is in competition with that of achieving high-fidelity qubit control and measurement. Here, we propose a method that integrates filtering techniques for preserving superconducting qubit lifetimes together with the dispersive coupling of the qubit to a microwave resonator for control and measurement. The result is a compact circuit that protects qubits from spontaneous loss to the environment, while also retaining the ability to perform fast, high-fidelity readout. Importantly, we show the device operates in a regime that is attainable with current experimental parameters and provide a specific example for superconducting qubits in circuit quantum electrodynamics.

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Superconducting Qubits and Quantum Resonators

P. Forn-Díaz

Superconducting qubits are fabricated "loss-free" electrical circuits on a chip with size features of tens of nanometers. If cooled to cryogenic temperatures below -273 °C they behave as quantum elements, similar to atoms and molecules. Such a qubit can be manipulated by fast-oscillating magnetic fields and its resulting quantum state can be measured using a proper magnetic detector. These qubits could be the basic elements for a quantum processor. To that order, multiple qubits have to controllably interact, and to that purpose very high quality resonators are fabricated on the same chip. Effectively the interaction results from the phase-coherent exchange of a single photon between qubit and resonator. In this way it is highly analogous to the so-called cavity QED in atomic physics where single atoms couple to a single trapped photon, all inside a cavity resonator. In this thesis, a superconducting flux qubit has been coupled to an LC resonator and coherent exchange of a single photon between qubit and resonator has been achieved. A striking option in these superconducting circuits, not attainable in "common" atomic cavity-QED, is that the interaction between qubit and photon can be made very large, up to the limit that one no longer can talk about the qubit and resonator as such. This limit requires a fully different description and it leads to novel effects, e.g. in the energy spectrum of the qubit-resonator composite. The Bloch-Siegert spectral shift is experimentally demonstrated in this thesis. As a small but critical technical aside a new type of control line filter has been developed, which allows strong suppression of excess electrical noise that forms a threat for qubit coherence. Having two modes of operation, it shorts all low-frequency noise if control is idle while being transparent if control is active, where short or open is determined by the control line signal level itself.

•Sep 27, 2010•3 citations
Abstract The rapid development in designs and fabrication techniques of superconducting qubits has made coherence times of qubits longer. In the future, however, the radiative decay of a qubit into its control line will be a fundamental limitation, imposing a trade-off between fast control and long lifetime of the qubit. Here, we break this trade-off by strongly coupling another superconducting qubit along the control line. This second qubit, which we call “Josephson quantum filter” (JQF), prevents the first qubit from emitting microwave photons and thus suppresses its relaxation, while transmitting large-amplitude control microwave pulses due to the saturation of the quantum filter, enabling fast qubit control. This device functions as an automatic decoupler between a qubit and its control line and could help in the realization of a large-scale superconducting quantum processor by reducing the heating of the qubit environment and the crosstalk between qubits.
The rapid development in designs and fabrication techniques of superconducting qubits has made coherence times of qubits longer. In the future, however, the radiative decay of a qubit into its control line will be a fundamental limitation, imposing a trade-off between fast control and long lifetime of the qubit. Here, we break this trade-off by strongly coupling another superconducting qubit along the control line. This second qubit, which we call "Josephson quantum filter" (JQF), prevents the first qubit from emitting microwave photons and thus suppresses its relaxation, while transmitting large-amplitude control microwave pulses due to the saturation of the quantum filter, enabling fast qubit control. This device functions as an automatic decoupler between a qubit and its control line and could help in the realization of a large-scale superconducting quantum processor by reducing the heating of the qubit environment and the crosstalk between qubits.
Abstract Achieving fast gates and long coherence times for superconducting qubits presents challenges, typically requiring either a stronger coupling of the drive line or an excessively strong microwave signal to the qubit. To address this, we introduce on-chip filters of the qubit drive exhibiting a stopband at the qubit frequency, thus enabling long coherence times and strong coupling at the subharmonic frequency, facilitating fast single-qubit gates, and reduced thermal load. The filters exhibit an extrinsic relaxation time of a few seconds while enabling sub-10-ns gates with subharmonic control. Here we show up to 200-fold improvement in the measured relaxation time at the stopband. Furthermore, we implement subharmonic driving of Rabi oscillations with a π pulse duration of 12 ns. Our demonstration of on-chip filters and efficient subharmonic driving in a two-dimensional quantum processor paves the way for a scalable qubit architecture with reduced thermal load and noise from the control line.
The coupling between a superconducting qubit and a control line inevitably results in radiative decay of the qubit into the line. We propose a Josephson quantum filter (JQF), which protects the data qubit (DQ) from radiative decay through the control line without reducing the gate speed on the DQ. The JQF consists of a qubit strongly coupled to the control line of the DQ and its working principle is a subradiance effect that is characteristic of waveguide quantum electrodynamics setups. The JQF is a passive circuit element and is therefore suitable for integration in a scalable superconducting qubit system.
Rapid reset and readout of qubit states are essential for quantum error correction, yet accelerating these operations through stronger coupling to a dissipative environment inevitably increases qubit decay via the Purcell effect. Here we present a broadband Purcell filter that decouples the reset and readout paths, enabling both operations to be independently optimized without compromising qubit coherence. The filter employs two engineered notches - an intrinsic notch and a bandstop notch - to provide broadband Purcell protection, together with an additional reset stub that creates a reset mode below the protected band. To enable fast reset while suppressing filter-mediated interactions between qubits, we couple each qubit to a dedicated reset resonator. We experimentally demonstrate Purcell-limited relaxation times exceeding 1 ms across a 1.2 GHz bandwidth, simultaneously with 500 ns readout without a Josephson parametric amplifier and 100 ns reset with 99.6% efficiency. The reset resonator is designed with a deliberate kappa-chi mismatch, which suppresses photon-shot-noise-induced dephasing by a factor of 70 compared to the readout resonator. Our work provides a scalable hardware solution that resolves the traditional trade-off between fast qubit operations and qubit protection, advancing the prospects for fault-tolerant quantum computing.
Physical implementations of qubits can be extremely sensitive to environmental coupling, which can result in decoherence. While efforts are made for protection, coupling to the environment is necessary to measure and manipulate the state of the qubit. As such, the goal of having long qubit energy relaxation times is in competition with that of achieving high-fidelity qubit control and measurement. Here, we propose a method that integrates filtering techniques for preserving superconducting qubit lifetimes together with the dispersive coupling of the qubit to a microwave resonator for control and measurement. The result is a compact circuit that protects qubits from spontaneous loss to the environment, while also retaining the ability to perform fast, high-fidelity readout. Importantly, we show the device operates in a regime that is attainable with current experimental parameters and provide a specific example for superconducting qubits in circuit quantum electrodynamics.
Superconducting qubits are fabricated "loss-free" electrical circuits on a chip with size features of tens of nanometers. If cooled to cryogenic temperatures below -273 °C they behave as quantum elements, similar to atoms and molecules. Such a qubit can be manipulated by fast-oscillating magnetic fields and its resulting quantum state can be measured using a proper magnetic detector. These qubits could be the basic elements for a quantum processor. To that order, multiple qubits have to controllably interact, and to that purpose very high quality resonators are fabricated on the same chip. Effectively the interaction results from the phase-coherent exchange of a single photon between qubit and resonator. In this way it is highly analogous to the so-called cavity QED in atomic physics where single atoms couple to a single trapped photon, all inside a cavity resonator. In this thesis, a superconducting flux qubit has been coupled to an LC resonator and coherent exchange of a single photon between qubit and resonator has been achieved. A striking option in these superconducting circuits, not attainable in "common" atomic cavity-QED, is that the interaction between qubit and photon can be made very large, up to the limit that one no longer can talk about the qubit and resonator as such. This limit requires a fully different description and it leads to novel effects, e.g. in the energy spectrum of the qubit-resonator composite. The Bloch-Siegert spectral shift is experimentally demonstrated in this thesis. As a small but critical technical aside a new type of control line filter has been developed, which allows strong suppression of excess electrical noise that forms a threat for qubit coherence. Having two modes of operation, it shorts all low-frequency noise if control is idle while being transparent if control is active, where short or open is determined by the control line signal level itself.