Unlocking a fast adiabatic CZ gate and exact residual
ZZ cancellation between fixed-frequency transmons using a floating tunable coupler
Tunable couplers in superconducting qubit architectures enable strong qubit-qubit interactions for two-qubit gates while suppressing unwanted coupling during single-qubit operations. However, achieving low error rates for fast two-qubit gates remains challenging, as suppressing leakage and non-adiabatic errors typically requires specialized qubit, coupler, or pulse designs, often at the expense of an idling
ZZ=0 condition. In this work, we demonstrate that a symmetric floating tunable coupler provides a natural platform for fast, high-fidelity adiabatic controlled-Z (CZ) gates. Its favorable energy-level structure eliminates the conventional trade-off between rapid conditional-phase accumulation and adiabatic evolution while preserving exact cancellation of residual
ZZ interaction at idling. This architecture exhibits intrinsic robustness to non-adiabatic transitions, even under simple flux modulation waveforms. To push performance at short gate durations, where maintaining adiabaticity becomes more challenging despite the favorable level structure, we introduce pulse-shaping techniques based on the instantaneous adiabatic factor that further suppress non-adiabatic errors. We experimentally realize a 24 ns adiabatic CZ gate with fidelity exceeding 99.9% and stable operation over several hours.
Applications for noisy intermediate-scale quantum computing devices rely on the efficient entanglement of many qubits to reach a potential quantum advantage. Although entanglement is typically generated using two-qubit gates, direct control of strong multiqubit interactions can improve the efficiency of the process. Here, we investigate a system of three superconducting transmon-type qubits coupled via a single flux-tunable coupler. Tuning the frequency of the coupler by adiabatic flux pulses enables us to control the conditional energy shifts between the qubits and directly realize multiqubit interactions. To accurately adjust the resulting controlled relative phases, we describe a gate protocol involving refocusing pulses and adjustable interaction times. This enables the implementation of the full family of pairwise controlled-phase and controlled-controlled-phase gates. Numerical simulations result in fidelities around 99% and gate times below 300 ns using currently achievable system parameters and decoherence rates.
Tunable couplers have recently become one of the most powerful tools for implementing two-qubit gates between superconducting qubits.A tunable coupler typically includes a nonlinear element, such as a superconducting quantum interference device, which is used to tune the resonance frequency of an LC circuit connecting two qubits.Here we propose a complimentary approach where instead of tuning the resonance frequency of the tunable coupler by applying a quasistatic control signal, we excite by microwave the degree of freedom associated with the coupler itself.Because of strong effective longitudinal coupling between the coupler and the qubits, the frequency of this transition strongly depends on the computational state, leading to different phase accumulations in different states.Using this method, we experimentally demonstrate a controlled-Z gate of 44-ns duration on a fluxonium-based quantum processor, obtaining a fidelity of 97.6% ± 0.4% characterized by cross-entropy benchmarking.