We reveal long-lived memory effects in the defect bath of a superconducting transmon qubit through electric-field tuning of two-level system (TLS) defects coupled to the qubit. Using a fast TLS mapping method we observe several hysteretic effects in the TLS environment with memory timescales of the order of seconds, far beyond the lifetimes of individual TLS defects. The observations can be explained by TLS coupling to electric field-polarised charge fluctuators in the defect bath. Our method enables detailed mapping of the dynamics of the bath's coupled microscopic degrees of freedom and the associated memory effects which can introduce temporally correlated noise. This information may be used to improve qubit-stabilisation and quantum error correction protocols.
Developing fault-tolerant quantum processors with error correction demands large arrays of physical qubits whose key performance metrics (coherence times, control fidelities) must remain within specifications over both short and long timescales. Here we investigated the temporal stability of subtractively fabricated CMOS-compatible superconducting transmon qubits. During a single cooldown and over a period of 95 hours, we monitored several parameters for 8 qubits, including coherence times
T1 and
T2∗, which exhibit fluctuations originating primarily from the interaction between two-level system (TLS) defects and the host qubit. We also demonstrate that subtractively-fabricated superconducting quantum devices align with the theoretical predictions that higher mean lifetimes
T1 correspond to larger fluctuations. To assess long-term stability, we tracked two representative qubits over 10 cooldown cycles spanning more than one year. We observed an average total downward shift in both qubit transition frequencies of approximately 61 MHz within the thermal cycles considered. In contrast, readout resonator frequencies decreased only marginally. Meanwhile,
T1 exhibits fluctuations from cycle to cycle, but maintains a stable baseline value.