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Chinese Physics B

Efficient characterization of the coupler spectrum via sideband driving in superconducting qubits

Jianwen Xu, Ruonan 若男 Guo 郭, Wen 文 Zheng 郑, Yu Zhang, Jie Zhao, Zhiguo Huang, Jingwei Wen, Runqing Zhang, Shaoxiong Li, Xinsheng Tan, Yu Yang

Published Aug 29, 2025• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract Fabrication-friendly superconducting qubits continue to be a leading candidate for scalable quantum computing. Recent developments in tunable couplers have significantly advanced the progress toward practical quantum processors. However, high-performance quantum control, particularly two-qubit gates, depends on the delicate tuning of the coupler spectrum, as misalignment can lead to undesirable phenomena such as frequency crowding, which may cause errors including state leakage. Here, we propose an efficient method for characterizing the coupler spectrum through sideband drivings, obviating the need for additional components in current quantum processors. We demonstrate this technique experimentally by employing both continuous-wave and pulsed measurement protocols, successfully extracting the coupler spectrum. Furthermore, by utilizing the measured coupler spectrum, we calibrate the frequency dependence of the effective coupling strength between two qubits linked by the coupler. The proposed approach offers significant practical benefits, enabling the efficient characterization of the coupler spectrum in existing quantum architectures, thus paving the way for enhanced quantum control and scalability.

DOI
10.1088/1674-1056/ae00b0

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Abstract Fabrication-friendly superconducting qubits continue to be a leading candidate for scalable quantum computing. Recent developments in tunable couplers have significantly advanced the progress toward practical quantum processors. However, high-performance quantum control, particularly two-qubit gates, depends on the delicate tuning of the coupler spectrum, as misalignment can lead to undesirable phenomena such as frequency crowding, which may cause errors including state leakage. Here, we propose an efficient method for characterizing the coupler spectrum through sideband drivings, obviating the need for additional components in current quantum processors. We demonstrate this technique experimentally by employing both continuous-wave and pulsed measurement protocols, successfully extracting the coupler spectrum. Furthermore, by utilizing the measured coupler spectrum, we calibrate the frequency dependence of the effective coupling strength between two qubits linked by the coupler. The proposed approach offers significant practical benefits, enabling the efficient characterization of the coupler spectrum in existing quantum architectures, thus paving the way for enhanced quantum control and scalability.
For superconducting quantum processors, stable high-fidelity two-qubit operations depend on precise flux control of the tunable coupler. However, the pulse distortion poses a significant challenge to the control precision. Current calibration methods, which often rely on microwave crosstalk or additional readout resonators for coupler excitation and readout, tend to be cumbersome and inefficient, especially when couplers only have flux control. Here, we introduce and experimentally validate a pulse calibration scheme that exploits the strong coupling between qubits and couplers, eliminating the need for extra coupler readout and excitation. Our method directly measures the short-time and long-time step responses of the coupler flux pulse transient, enabling us to apply predistortion to subsequent signals using fast Fourier transformation and deconvolution. This approach not only simplifies the calibration process, but also significantly improves the precision and stability of the flux control. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method through the implementation of diabatic controlled-ZZZ (cz) and iiiswap gates with fidelities of $99.61\mathrm{%}\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.04\mathrm{%}$ and $99.82\mathrm{%}\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.02\mathrm{%}$, respectively, as well as a series of diabatic controlled-phase gates with high fidelities characterized by cross-entropy benchmarking. The consistency and robustness of our technique are further validated by the reduction in pulse distortion and phase error observed across multilayer cz gates. These results underscore the potential of our calibration and predistortion method to enhance the performance of two-qubit gates in superconducting quantum processors.
In the pursuit of scalable superconducting quantum computing, tunable couplers have emerged as a pivotal component, offering the flexibility required for complex quantum operations of high performance. In most current architectures of superconducting quantum chips, such couplers are not equipped with dedicated readout circuits to reduce complexity in both design and operation. However, this strategy poses challenges in precise characterization, calibration, and control of the couplers. In this work, we develop a hardware-efficient and robust technique based on adiabatic control to address this issue. The critical ingredient of this technique is adiabatic swap operation between a tunable coupler and nearby qubits. Using this technique, we have characterized and calibrated tunable couplers in our chips and achieved straightforward and precise control over these couplers. For example, we have demonstrated the calibration and correction of the flux distortion of couplers. In addition, we have also expanded this technique to tune the dispersive shift between a frequency-fixed qubit and its readout resonator over a wide range.
Superconducting qubits are a promising platform for building fault-tolerant quantum computers, with recent achievement showing the suppression of logical error with increasing code size. However, leakage into noncomputational states, a common issue in practical quantum systems including superconducting circuits, introduces correlated errors that undermine quantum error correction (QEC) scalability. Here, we propose and demonstrate a leakage reduction scheme utilizing tunable couplers, a widely adopted ingredient in large-scale superconducting quantum processors. Leveraging the strong frequency tunability of the couplers and stray interaction between the couplers and readout resonators, we eliminate state leakage on the couplers, thus suppressing space-correlated errors caused by population propagation among the couplers. Assisted by the couplers, we further reduce leakage to higher qubit levels with high efficiency (98.1%) and low error rate on the computational subspace (0.58%), suppressing time-correlated errors during QEC cycles. The performance of our scheme demonstrates its potential as an indispensable building block for scalable QEC with superconducting qubits.
Tunable couplers have recently emerged as an essential component in superconducting quantum processors. These couplers usually do not have readout resonators to save control or hardware overhead; this makes it challenging to characterize and calibrate the coupler, which will undoubtedly limit the performance of a fast two-qubit gate. Here, we theoretically demonstrate that by mapping the coupler's state onto that of its neighboring qubit, the high-contrast readout of the coupler can be realized. We experimentally implement such a readout scheme with a single-shot readout fidelity of 86%, which is mainly limited by the thermal population of our sample. We further demonstrate how to calibrate the flux crosstalk related to the coupler and its flux distortion that are ignored in the previous works. These calibration steps are imperative for realizing robust and accurate quantum operations in frequency-tunable superconducting circuits.
As systems for quantum computing keep growing in size and number of qubits, challenges in scaling the control capabilities are becoming increasingly relevant. Efficient schemes to simultaneously mediate coherent interactions between multiple quantum systems and to reduce decoherence errors can minimize the control overhead in next-generation quantum processors. Here, we present a superconducting qubit architecture based on tunable parametric interactions to perform two-qubit gates, reset, leakage recovery, and to read out the qubits. In this architecture, parametrically driven multielement couplers selectively couple qubits to resonators and neighboring qubits, according to the frequency of the drive. We consider a system with two qubits and one readout resonator interacting via a single coupling circuit and experimentally demonstrate a controlled- Z gate with a fidelity of 98.30 ± 0.23 % , a reset operation that unconditionally prepares the qubit ground state with a fidelity of 99.80 ± 0.02 % and a leakage recovery operation with a 98.5 ± 0.3 % success probability. Furthermore, we implement a parametric readout with a single-shot assignment fidelity of 88.0 ± 0.4 % . These operations are all realized using a single tunable coupler and a statically decoupled resonator, demonstrating the experimental feasibility of the proposed architecture and its potential for reducing the system complexity in scalable quantum processors.
The design of coupler-based superconducting two-qubit gates simplifies circuit layout and alleviate frequency crowding, thereby enhancing the scalability and flexibility of quantum chips. However, in such architectures, a trade-off often exists between suppressing crosstalk and reducing gate duration, and how to achieve synergistic optimization of both remains an open challenge. To address this, this paper proposes a coupler-assisted superconducting two-qubit geometric gate scheme oriented towards crosstalk robustness. By introducing additional parametric degrees of freedom, the scheme steers the system evolution along desired trajectories, thereby flexibly avoiding crosstalk-sensitive operational regions. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed scheme can effectively suppress crosstalk errors while enabling fast gate operations, and exhibits strong robustness against typical experimental imperfections such as qubit frequency drift. Moreover, even when accounting for unavoidable high-frequency oscillation terms and qubit decoherence in realistic physical systems, our crosstalk-robust two-qubit geometric gates still achieve high fidelity. This work provides a feasible pathway toward robust and efficient two-qubit gate implementation in superconducting quantum computation.