No Arabic abstract
The ability to engineer and manipulate different types of quantum mechanical objects allows us to take advantage of their unique properties and create useful hybrid technologies. Thus far, complex quantum states and exquisite quantum control have been demonstrated in systems ranging from trapped ions to superconducting resonators. Recently, there have been many efforts to extend these demonstrations to the motion of complex, macroscopic objects. These mechanical objects have important applications as quantum memories or transducers for measuring and connecting different types of quantum systems. In particular, there have been a few experiments that couple motion to nonlinear quantum objects such as superconducting qubits. This opens up the possibility of creating, storing, and manipulating non-Gaussian quantum states in mechanical degrees of freedom. However, before sophisticated quantum control of mechanical motion can be achieved, we must realize systems with long coherence times while maintaining a sufficient interaction strength. These systems should be implemented in a simple and robust manner that allows for increasing complexity and scalability in the future. Here we experimentally demonstrate a high frequency bulk acoustic wave resonator that is strongly coupled to a superconducting qubit using piezoelectric transduction. In contrast to previous experiments with qubit-mechanical systems, our device requires only simple fabrication methods, extends coherence times to many microseconds, and provides controllable access to a multitude of phonon modes. We use this system to demonstrate basic quantum operations on the coupled qubit-phonon system. Straightforward improvements to the current device will allow for advanced protocols analogous to what has been shown in optical and microwave resonators, resulting in a novel resource for implementing hybrid quantum technologies.
We propose a quantum simulator based on driven superconducting qubits where the interactions are generated parametrically by a polychromatic magnetic flux modulation of a tunable bus element. Using a time-dependent Schrieffer-Wolff transformation, we analytically derive a multi-qubit Hamiltonian which features independently tunable $XX$ and $YY$-type interactions as well as local bias fields over a large parameter range. We demonstrate the adiabatic simulation of the ground state of a hydrogen molecule using two superconducting qubits and one tunable bus element. The time required to reach chemical accuracy lies in the few microsecond range and therefore could be implemented on currently available superconducting circuits. Further applications of this technique may also be found in the simulation of interacting spin systems.
A quantum computer will use the properties of quantum physics to solve certain computational problems much faster than otherwise possible. One promising potential implementation is to use superconducting quantum bits in the circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) architecture. There, the low energy states of a nonlinear electronic oscillator are isolated and addressed as a qubit. These qubits are capacitively coupled to the modes of a microwave-frequency transmission line resonator which serves as a quantum communication bus. Microwave electrical pulses are applied to the resonator to manipulate or measure the qubit state. State control is calibrated using diagnostic sequences that expose systematic errors. Hybridization of the resonator with the qubit gives it a nonlinear response when driven strongly, useful for amplifying the measurement signal to enhance accuracy. Qubits coupled to the same bus may coherently interact with one another via the exchange of virtual photons. A two-qubit conditional phase gate mediated by this interaction can deterministically entangle its targets, and is used to generate two-qubit Bell states and three-qubit GHZ states. These three-qubit states are of particular interest because they redundantly encode quantum information. They are the basis of the quantum repetition code prototypical of more sophisticated schemes required for quantum computation. Using a three-qubit Toffoli gate, this code is demonstrated to autonomously correct either bit- or phase-flip errors. Despite observing the expected behavior, the overall fidelity is low because of decoherence. A superior implementation of cQED replaces the transmission-line resonator with a three-dimensional box mode, increasing lifetimes by an order of magnitude. In-situ qubit frequency control is enabled with control lines, which are used to fully characterize and control the system Hamiltonian.
In this review, we discuss recent experiments that investigate how the quantum sate of a superconducting qubit evolves during measurement. We provide a pedagogical overview of the measurement process, when the qubit is dispersively coupled to a microwave frequency cavity, and the qubit state is encoded in the phase of a microwave tone that probes the cavity. A continuous measurement record is used to reconstruct the individual quantum trajectories of the qubit state, and quantum state tomography is performed to verify that the state has been tracked accurately. Furthermore, we discuss ensembles of trajectories, time-symmetric evolution, two-qubit trajectories, and potential applications in measurement-based quantum error correction.
Fundamental questions in chemistry and physics may never be answered due to the exponential complexity of the underlying quantum phenomena. A desire to overcome this challenge has sparked a new industry of quantum technologies with the promise that engineered quantum systems can address these hard problems. A key step towards demonstrating such a system will be performing a computation beyond the capabilities of any classical computer, achieving so-called quantum supremacy. Here, using 9 superconducting qubits, we demonstrate an immediate path towards quantum supremacy. By individually tuning the qubit parameters, we are able to generate thousands of unique Hamiltonian evolutions and probe the output probabilities. The measured probabilities obey a universal distribution, consistent with uniformly sampling the full Hilbert-space. As the number of qubits in the algorithm is varied, the system continues to explore the exponentially growing number of states. Combining these large datasets with techniques from machine learning allows us to construct a model which accurately predicts the measured probabilities. We demonstrate an application of these algorithms by systematically increasing the disorder and observing a transition from delocalized states to localized states. By extending these results to a system of 50 qubits, we hope to address scientific questions that are beyond the capabilities of any classical computer.
The execution of quantum circuits on real systems has largely been limited to those which are simply time-ordered sequences of unitary operations followed by a projective measurement. As hardware platforms for quantum computing continue to mature in size and capability, it is imperative to enable quantum circuits beyond their conventional construction. Here we break into the realm of dynamic quantum circuits on a superconducting-based quantum system. Dynamic quantum circuits involve not only the evolution of the quantum state throughout the computation, but also periodic measurements of a subset of qubits mid-circuit and concurrent processing of the resulting classical information within timescales shorter than the execution times of the circuits. Using noisy quantum hardware, we explore one of the most fundamental quantum algorithms, quantum phase estimation, in its adaptive version, which exploits dynamic circuits, and compare the results to a non-adaptive implementation of the same algorithm. We demonstrate that the version of real-time quantum computing with dynamic circuits can offer a substantial and tangible advantage when noise and latency are sufficiently low in the system, opening the door to a new realm of available algorithms on real quantum systems.