No Arabic abstract
Electromagnetic filtering is essential for the coherent control, operation and readout of superconducting quantum circuits at milliKelvin temperatures. The suppression of spurious modes around the transition frequencies of a few GHz is well understood and mainly achieved by on-chip and package considerations. Noise photons of higher frequencies -- beyond the pair-breaking energies -- cause decoherence, and require spectral engineering before reaching the packaged quantum chip. The external wires through the refrigerator down to the quantum circuit provides a direct path, and this article contains quantitative analysis and experimental data for noise photon flux through the coaxial filtered wiring. The coaxial cable room temperature attenuation and the noise photon flux estimates for typical wiring configurations are provided, and compact cryogenic microwave low-pass filters with CR-110 and Esorb-230 absorptive dielectric fillings along with experimental data at room and cryogenic temperatures and up to 70 GHz presented. The filter cut-off frequencies between 1 to 10 GHz are set by the filter length, and the roll-off is material dependent. The relative dielectric permittivity and magnetic permeability for the Esorb-230 material in the pair-breaking frequency range from 75 to 110 GHz are measured, and the filter properties in this frequency range are calculated. The filter contribution to the noise photon flux implies a dramatic reduction, proving their usefulness for experiments with superconducting quantum systems.
We report on high-efficiency superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors based on amorphous WSi and optimized at 1064 nm. At an operating temperature of 1.8 K, we demonstrated a 93% system detection efficiency at this wavelength with a dark noise of a few counts per second. Combined with cavity-enhanced spontaneous parametric down-conversion, this fiber-coupled detector enabled us to generate narrowband single photons with a heralding efficiency greater than 90% and a high spectral brightness of $0.6times10^4$ photons/(s$cdot$mW$cdot$MHz). Beyond single-photon generation at large rate, such high-efficiency detectors open the path to efficient multiple-photon heralding and complex quantum state engineering.
The investigation of two-level-state (TLS) loss in dielectric materials and interfaces remains at the forefront of materials research in superconducting quantum circuits. We demonstrate a method of TLS loss extraction of a thin film dielectric by measuring a lumped element resonator fabricated from a superconductor-dielectric-superconductor trilayer. We extract the dielectric loss by formulating a circuit model for a lumped element resonator with TLS loss and then fitting to this model using measurements from a set of three resonator designs: a coplanar waveguide resonator, a lumped element resonator with an interdigitated capacitor, and a lumped element resonator with a parallel plate capacitor that includes the dielectric thin film of interest. Unlike other methods, this allows accurate measurement of materials with TLS loss lower than $10^{-6}$. We demonstrate this method by extracting a TLS loss of $1.02 times 10^{-3}$ for sputtered $mathrm{Al_2O_3}$ using a set of samples fabricated from an $mathrm{Al/Al_2O_3/Al}$ trilayer. We observe a difference of 11$%$ between extracted loss of the trilayer with and without the implementation of this method.
Superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) are among the most sensitive detectors for out-of-plane magnetic field components. However, due to their periodic response with short modulation period $M = 1 Phi_0$, determined by the magnetic flux quantum $Phi_0 approx 2.068times 10^{-15},mathrm{Wb}$, it is difficult to infer the value of the magnetic flux unambiguously, especially in case the magnetic flux enclosed in the SQUID loop changes by many flux quanta. Here, we demonstrate that by introducing a second degree of freedom in the form of a second SQUID, we substantially enhance the modulation period $M$ of our device without sacrificing sensitivity. As a proof of concept, we implement our idea by embedding two asymmetric direct current SQUIDs into a common tank circuit. By measuring the reflection coefficient of the device, we extract the two lowest energy eigenfrequencies as a function of the external magnetic flux created by a superconducting field coil, from which we experimentally deduce a modulation period $M geq 15 Phi_0$, as well as the magnetic offset-field $B_0 = 22,mathrm{nT}$ present in our experiment.
Low-loss fiber optic links have the potential to connect superconducting quantum processors together over long distances to form large scale quantum networks. A key component of these future networks is a quantum transducer that coherently and bidirectionally converts photons from microwave frequencies to optical frequencies. We present a platform for electro-optic photon conversion based on silicon-organic hybrid photonics. Our device combines high quality factor microwave and optical resonators with an electro-optic polymer cladding to perform microwave-to-optical photon conversion from 6.7 GHz to 193 THz (1558 nm). The device achieves an electro-optic coupling rate of 330 Hz in a millikelvin dilution refrigerator environment. We use an optical heterodyne measurement technique to demonstrate the single-sideband nature of the conversion with a selectivity of approximately 10 dB. We analyze the effects of stray light in our device and suggest ways in which this can be mitigated. Finally, we present initial results on high-impedance spiral resonators designed to increase the electro-optic coupling.
We propose an experimentally accessible superconducting quantum circuit, consisting of two coplanar waveguide resonators (CWRs), to enhance the microwave squeezing via parametric down-conversion (PDC). In our scheme, the two CWRs are nonlinearly coupled through a superconducting quantum interference device embedded in one of the CWRs. This is equivalent to replacing the transmission line in a flux-driven Josephson parametric amplifier (JPA) by a CWR, which makes it possible to drive the JPA by a quantized microwave field. Owing to this design, the PDC coefficient can be considerably increased to be about tens of megahertz, satisfying the strong-coupling condition. Using the Heisenberg-Langevin approach, we numerically show the enhancement of the microwave squeezing in our scheme. In contrast to the JPA, our proposed system becomes stable around the critical point and can generate stronger transient squeezing. In addition, the strong-coupling PDC can be used to engineer the photon blockade.