No Arabic abstract
As the field of quantum computing progresses to larger-scale devices, multiplexing will be crucial to scale quantum processors. While multiplexed readout is common practice for superconducting devices, relatively little work has been reported about the combination of flux and microwave control lines. Here, we present a method to integrate a microwave line and a flux line into a single XYZ line. This combined control line allows us to perform fast single-qubit gates as well as to deliver flux signals to the qubits. The measured relaxation times of the qubits are comparable to state-of-art devices employing separate control lines. We benchmark the fidelity of single-qubit gates with randomized benchmarking, achieving a fidelity above 99.5%, and we demonstrate that XYZ lines can in principle be used to run parametric entangling gates.
Scaling up superconducting quantum processors with optimized performance requires a sufficient flexibility in the choice of operating points for single and two qubit gates to maximize their fidelity and cope with imperfections. Flux control is an efficient technique to manipulate the parameters of tunable qubits, in particular to activate entangling gates. At flux sensitive points of operation, the ubiquitous presence of 1/f flux noise however gives rise to dephasing by inducing fluctuations of the qubit frequency. We show how two-tone modulation of the flux bias, a bichromatic modulation, gives rise to a continuum of dynamical sweet spots where dephasing due to slow flux noise is suppressed to first order for a wide range of time-averaged qubit frequencies. The qubits can be operated at these dynamical sweet spots to realize protected entangling gates and to avoid collisions with two-level-system defects.
We describe a scheme to coherently convert a microwave photon of a superconducting co-planar waveguide resonator to an optical photon emitted into a well-defined temporal and spatial mode. The conversion is realized by a cold atomic ensemble trapped above the surface of the superconducting atom chip, near the antinode of the microwave cavity. The microwave photon couples to a strong Rydberg transition of the atoms that are also driven by a pair of laser fields with appropriate frequencies and wavevectors for an efficient wave-mixing process. With only few thousand atoms in an ensemble of moderate density, the microwave photon can be completely converted into an optical photon emitted with high probability into the phase matched direction and, e.g., fed into a fiber waveguide. This scheme operates in a free-space configuration, without requiring strong coupling of the atoms to a resonant optical cavity.
We present a design for a superconducting, on-chip circulator composed of dynamically modulated transfer switches and delays. Design goals are set for the multiplexed readout of superconducting qubits. Simulations of the device show that it allows for low-loss circulation (insertion loss < 0.35 dB and isolation >20 dB) over an instantaneous bandwidth of 2.3 GHz. As the device is estimated to be linear for input powers up to -65 dBm, this design improves on the bandwidth and power-handling of previous superconducting circulators by over a factor of 50, making it ideal for integration with broadband quantum limited amplifiers.
We analyze the design of a potential replacement technology for the commercial ferrite circulators that are ubiquitous in contemporary quantum superconducting microwave experiments. The lossless, lumped element design is capable of being integrated on chip with other superconducting microwave devices, thus circumventing the many performance-limiting aspects of ferrite circulators. The design is based on the dynamic modulation of DC superconducting microwave quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) that function as nearly linear, tunable inductors. The connection to familiar ferrite-based circulators is a simple frame boost in the internal dynamics equation of motion. In addition to the general, schematic analysis, we also give an overview of many considerations necessary to achieve a practical design with a tunable center frequency in the 4-8 GHz frequency band, a bandwidth of 240 MHz, reflections at the -20 dB level, and a maximum signal power of approximately order 100 microwave photons per inverse bandwidth.
Superconducting flux qubits are a promising candidate for realizing quantum information processing and quantum simulations. Such devices behave like artificial atoms, with the advantage that one can easily tune the atoms internal properties. Here, by harnessing this flexibility, we propose a technique to minimize the inhomogeneous broadening of a large ensemble of flux qubits by tuning only the external flux. In addition, as an example of many-body physics in such an ensemble, we show how to observe superradiance, and its quadratic scaling with ensemble size, using a tailored microwave control pulse that takes advantage of the inhomogeneous broadening itself to excite only a sub-ensemble of the qubits. Our scheme opens up an approach to using superconducting circuits to explore the properties of quantum many-body systems.