No Arabic abstract
Building a quantum computer is a daunting challenge since it requires good control but also good isolation from the environment to minimize decoherence. It is therefore important to realize quantum gates efficiently, using as few operations as possible, to reduce the amount of required control and operation time and thus improve the quantum state coherence. Here we propose a superconducting circuit for implementing a tunable system consisting of a qutrit coupled to two qubits. This system can efficiently accomplish various quantum information tasks, including generation of entanglement of the two qubits and conditional three-qubit quantum gates, such as the Toffoli and Fredkin gates. Furthermore, the system realizes a conditional geometric gate which may be used for holonomic (non-adiabatic) quantum computing. The efficiency, robustness and universality of the presented circuit makes it a promising candidate to serve as a building block for larger networks capable of performing involved quantum computational tasks.
Quantum computers promise to solve certain problems exponentially faster than possible classically but are challenging to build because of their increased susceptibility to errors. Remarkably, however, it is possible to detect and correct errors without destroying coherence by using quantum error correcting codes [1]. The simplest of these are the three-qubit codes, which map a one-qubit state to an entangled three-qubit state and can correct any single phase-flip or bit-flip error of one of the three qubits, depending on the code used [2]. Here we demonstrate both codes in a superconducting circuit by encoding a quantum state as previously shown [3,4], inducing errors on all three qubits with some probability, and decoding the error syndrome by reversing the encoding process. This syndrome is then used as the input to a three-qubit gate which corrects the primary qubit if it was flipped. As the code can recover from a single error on any qubit, the fidelity of this process should decrease only quadratically with error probability. We implement the correcting three-qubit gate, known as a conditional-conditional NOT (CCNot) or Toffoli gate, using an interaction with the third excited state of a single qubit, in 63 ns. We find 85pm1% fidelity to the expected classical action of this gate and 78pm1% fidelity to the ideal quantum process matrix. Using it, we perform a single pass of both quantum bit- and phase-flip error correction with 76pm0.5% process fidelity and demonstrate the predicted first-order insensitivity to errors. Concatenating these two codes and performing them on a nine-qubit device would correct arbitrary single-qubit errors. When combined with recent advances in superconducting qubit coherence times [5,6], this may lead to scalable quantum technology.
Simulating quantum physics with a device which itself is quantum mechanical, a notion Richard Feynman originated, would be an unparallelled computational resource. However, the universal quantum simulation of fermionic systems is daunting due to their particle statistics, and Feynman left as an open question whether it could be done, because of the need for non-local control. Here, we implement fermionic interactions with digital techniques in a superconducting circuit. Focusing on the Hubbard model, we perform time evolution with constant interactions as well as a dynamic phase transition with up to four fermionic modes encoded in four qubits. The implemented digital approach is universal and allows for the efficient simulation of fermions in arbitrary spatial dimensions. We use in excess of 300 single-qubit and two-qubit gates, and reach global fidelities which are limited by gate errors. This demonstration highlights the feasibility of the digital approach and opens a viable route towards analog-digital quantum simulation of interacting fermions and bosons in large-scale solid state systems.
The length of time that a quantum system can exist in a superposition state is determined by how strongly it interacts with its environment. This interaction entangles the quantum state with the inherent fluctuations of the environment. If these fluctuations are not measured, the environment can be viewed as a source of noise, causing random evolution of the quantum system from an initially pure state into a statistical mixture-a process known as decoherence. However, by accurately measuring the environment in real time, the quantum system can be maintained in a pure state and its time evolution described by a quantum trajectory conditioned on the measurement outcome. We employ weak measurements to monitor a microwave cavity embedding a superconducting qubit and track the individual quantum trajectories of the system. In this architecture, the environment is dominated by the fluctuations of a single electromagnetic mode of the cavity. Using a near-quantum-limited parametric amplifier, we selectively measure either the phase or amplitude of the cavity field, and thereby confine trajectories to either the equator or a meridian of the Bloch sphere. We perform quantum state tomography at discrete times along the trajectory to verify that we have faithfully tracked the state of the quantum system as it diffuses on the surface of the Bloch sphere. Our results demonstrate that decoherence can be mitigated by environmental monitoring and validate the foundations of quantum feedback approaches based on Bayesian statistics. Moreover, our experiments suggest a new route for implementing what Schrodinger termed quantum steering-harnessing action at a distance to manipulate quantum states via measurement.
We propose an experimentally realizable hybrid quantum circuit for achieving a strong coupling between a spin ensemble and a transmission-line resonator via a superconducting flux qubit used as a data bus. The resulting coupling can be used to transfer quantum information between the spin ensemble and the resonator. In particular, in contrast to the direct coupling without a data bus, our approach requires far less spins to achieve a strong coupling between the spin ensemble and the resonator (e.g., three to four orders of magnitude less). This proposed hybrid quantum circuit could enable a long-time quantum memory when storing information in the spin ensemble, and allows the possibility to explore nonlinear effects in the ultrastrong-coupling regime.
We measure the quantum fluctuations of a pumped nonlinear resonator, using a superconducting artificial atom as an in-situ probe. The qubit excitation spectrum gives access to the frequency and temperature of the intracavity field fluctuations. These are found to be in agreement with theoretical predictions; in particular we experimentally observe the phenomenon of quantum heating.