Realization of a Λ System with Metastable States of a Capacitively Shunted Fluxonium

Non-Abelian Holonomy of Majorana Zero Modes Coupled to a Chaotic Quantum Dot

If a quantum dot is coupled to a topological superconductor via tunneling contacts, each contact hosts a Majorana zero mode in the limit of zero transmission. Close to a resonance and at a finite contact transparency, the resonant level in the quantum dot couples the Majorana modes, but a ground-state degeneracy per fermion parity subspace remains if the number of Majorana modes coupled to the dot is five or larger. Upon varying shape-defining gate voltages while remaining close to resonance, a nontrivial evolution within the degenerate ground-state manifold is achieved. We characterize the corresponding non-Abelian holonomy for a quantum dot with chaotic classical dynamics using random matrix theory and discuss measurable signatures of the non-Abelian time evolution.

A hybrid-qudit representation of digital RGB images

Quantum image processing is an emerging topic in the field of quantum information and technology. In this paper, we propose a new quantum image representation of RGB images with deterministic image retrieval, which is an improvement over all the similar existing representations in terms of using minimum resource. We use two entangled quantum registers constituting of total 7 qutrits to encode the color channels and their intensities. Additionally, we generalize the existing encoding methods by using both qubits and qutrits to encode the pixel positions of a rectangular image. This hybrid-qudit approach aligns well with the current progress of NISQ devices in incorporating higher dimensional quantum systems than qubits. We then describe the image encoding method using higher-order qubit-qutrit gates, and demonstrate the decomposition of these gates in terms of simpler elementary gates. We use the Google Cirq's quantum simulator to verify the image preparation in both the ideal noise-free scenario and in presence of realistic noise modelling. We show that the complexity of the image encoding process is linear in the number of pixels. Lastly, we discuss the image compression and some basic RGB image processing protocols using our representation.

Quantum computer-aided design for advanced superconducting qubit: Plasmonium

Complex quantum electronic circuits can be used to design noise-protected qubits, but their complexity may exceed the capabilities of classical simulation. In such cases, quantum computers are necessary for efficient simulation. In this work, we demonstrate the use of variational quantum computing on a transmon-based quantum processor to simulate a superconducting quantum electronic circuit and design a new type of qubit called "Plasmonium", which operates in the plasmon-transition regime. The fabricated Plasmonium qubits show a high two-qubit gate fidelity of 99.58(3)%, as well as a smaller physical size and larger anharmonicity compared to transmon qubits. These properties make Plasmonium a promising candidate for scaling up multi-qubit devices. Our results demonstrate the potential of using quantum computers to aid in the design of advanced quantum processors.

Inductively shunted transmons exhibit noise insensitive plasmon states and a fluxon decay exceeding 3 hours

Currently available quantum processors are dominated by noise, which severely limits their applicability and motivates the search for new physical qubit encodings. In this work, we introduce the inductively shunted transmon, a weakly flux-tunable superconducting qubit that offers charge offset protection for all levels and a 20-fold reduction in flux dispersion compared to the state-of-the-art resulting in a constant coherence over a full flux quantum. The parabolic confinement provided by the inductive shunt as well as the linearity of the geometric superinductor facilitates a high-power readout that resolves quantum jumps with a fidelity and QND-ness of >90% and without the need for a Josephson parametric amplifier. Moreover, the device reveals quantum tunneling physics between the two prepared fluxon ground states with a measured average decay time of up to 3.5 h. In the future, fast time-domain control of the transition matrix elements could offer a new path forward to also achieve full qubit control in the decay-protected fluxon basis.

Coarse-Grained Effective Hamiltonian via the Magnus Expansion for a Three-Level System

Quantum state processing is one of the main tools of quantum technologies. While real systems are complicated and/or may be driven by non-ideal control, they may nevertheless exhibit simple dynamics approximately confined to a low-energy Hilbert subspace. Adiabatic elimination is the simplest approximation scheme allowing us to derive in certain cases an effective Hamiltonian operating in a low-dimensional Hilbert subspace. However, these approximations may present ambiguities and difficulties, hindering a systematic improvement of their accuracy in larger and larger systems. Here, we use the Magnus expansion as a systematic tool to derive ambiguity-free effective Hamiltonians. We show that the validity of the approximations ultimately leverages only on a proper coarse-graining in time of the exact dynamics. We validate the accuracy of the obtained effective Hamiltonians with suitably tailored fidelities of quantum operations.

Unimon qubit

Superconducting qubits seem promising for useful quantum computers, but the currently wide-spread qubit designs and techniques do not yet provide high enough performance. Here, we introduce a superconducting-qubit type, the unimon, which combines the desired properties of increased anharmonicity, full insensitivity to dc charge noise, reduced sensitivity to flux noise, and a simple structure consisting only of a single Josephson junction in a resonator. In agreement with our quantum models, we measure the qubit frequency, ω01/(2π), and increased anharmonicity α/(2π) at the optimal operation point, yielding, for example, 99.9% and 99.8% fidelity for 13 ns single-qubit gates on two qubits with (ω01, α) = (4.49 GHz, 434 MHz) × 2π and (3.55 GHz, 744 MHz) × 2π, respectively. The energy relaxation seems to be dominated by dielectric losses. Thus, improvements of the design, materials, and gate time may promote the unimon to break the 99.99% fidelity target for efficient quantum error correction and possible useful quantum advantage with noisy systems.

Berry Phase from the Entanglement of Future and Past Light Cones: Detecting the Timelike Unruh Effect

The Unruh effect can not only arise out of the entanglement between modes of left and right Rindler wedges, but also between modes of future and past light cones. We explore the geometric phase resulting from this timelike entanglement between the future and past, showing that it can be captured in a simple Λ system. This provides an alternative paradigm to the Unruh-deWitt detector. The Unruh effect has not been experimentally verified because the accelerations needed to excite a response from Unruh-deWitt detectors are prohibitively large. We demonstrate that a stationary but time-dependent Λ-system detects the timelike Unruh effect with current technology.

Ultrahigh Kinetic Inductance Superconducting Materials from Spinodal Decomposition

Disordered superconducting nitrides with kinetic inductance have long been considered to be leading material candidates for high-inductance quantum-circuit applications. Despite continuing efforts toward reducing material dimensions to increase the kinetic inductance and the corresponding circuit impedance, achieving further improvements without compromising material quality has become a fundamental challenge. To this end, a method to drastically increase the kinetic inductance of superconducting materials via spinodal decomposition while maintaining a low microwave loss is proposed. Epitaxial Ti_0.48 Al_0.52 N is used as a model system and the utilization of spinodal decomposition to trigger the insulator-to-superconductor transition with a drastically enhanced material disorder is demonstrated. The measured kinetic inductance increases by two to three orders of magnitude compared with the best disordered superconducting nitrides reported to date. This work paves the way for substantially enhancing and deterministically controlling the inductance for advanced superconducting quantum circuits.

Circuit Quantum Electrodynamics in Hyperbolic Space: From Photon Bound States to Frustrated Spin Models

Circuit quantum electrodynamics is one of the most promising platforms for efficient quantum simulation and computation. In recent groundbreaking experiments, the immense flexibility of superconducting microwave resonators was utilized to realize hyperbolic lattices that emulate quantum physics in negatively curved space. Here we investigate experimentally feasible settings in which a few superconducting qubits are coupled to a bath of photons evolving on the hyperbolic lattice. We compare our numerical results for finite lattices with analytical results for continuous hyperbolic space on the Poincaré disk. We find good agreement between the two descriptions in the long-wavelength regime. We show that photon-qubit bound states have a curvature-limited size. We propose to use a qubit as a local probe of the hyperbolic bath, for example, by measuring the relaxation dynamics of the qubit. We find that, although the boundary effects strongly impact the photonic density of states, the spectral density is well described by the continuum theory. We show that interactions between qubits are mediated by photons propagating along geodesics. We demonstrate that the photonic bath can give rise to geometrically frustrated hyperbolic quantum spin models with finite-range or exponentially decaying interaction.

Intrinsic Photon Loss at the Interface of Superconducting Devices

We present a quantum theory of dielectric energy loss arising from the piezoelectric coupling between photons and phonons in superconducting devices. Photon loss is shown to occur predominantly at the interface, where the piezoelectric effect is nonzero even when the materials are perfectly crystalline (epitaxial) and free of two-level system defects. We present explicit numerical calculations for the value of the intrinsic loss tangent at several interfaces to conclude that the T_{1} of superconducting qubits may reach over 10^{4}  μs if the device is made with defect-free interfaces.

Parity-Protected Superconductor-Semiconductor Qubit

Coherence of superconducting qubits can be improved by implementing designs that protect the parity of Cooper pairs on superconducting islands. Here, we introduce a parity-protected qubit based on voltage-controlled semiconductor nanowire Josephson junctions, taking advantage of the higher harmonic content in the energy-phase relation of few-channel junctions. A symmetric interferometer formed by two such junctions, gate-tuned into balance and frustrated by a half-quantum of applied flux, yields a cos(2φ) Josephson element, reflecting coherent transport of pairs of Cooper pairs. We demonstrate that relaxation of the qubit can be suppressed tenfold by tuning into the protected regime.

Granular aluminium as a superconducting material for high-impedance quantum circuits

Superconducting quantum information processing machines are predominantly based on microwave circuits with relatively low characteristic impedance, about 100 Ω, and small anharmonicity, which can limit their coherence and logic gate fidelity^1,2. A promising alternative is circuits based on so-called superinductors^3-6, with characteristic impedances exceeding the resistance quantum R_Q = 6.4 kΩ. However, previous implementations of superinductors, consisting of mesoscopic Josephson junction arrays^7,8, can introduce unintended nonlinearity or parasitic resonant modes in the qubit vicinity, degrading its coherence. Here, we present a fluxonium qubit design based on a granular aluminium superinductor strip^9-11. We show that granular aluminium can form an effective junction array with high kinetic inductance and be in situ integrated with standard aluminium circuit processing. The measured qubit coherence time [Formula: see text] illustrates the potential of granular aluminium for applications ranging from protected qubit designs to quantum-limited amplifiers and detectors.

Experimental Realization of Nonadiabatic Shortcut to Non-Abelian Geometric Gates

When a quantum system is driven slowly through a parametric cycle in a degenerate Hilbert space, the state would acquire a non-Abelian geometric phase, which is stable and forms the foundation for holonomic quantum computation (HQC). However, in the adiabatic limit, the environmental decoherence becomes a significant source of errors. Recently, various nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation (NHQC) schemes have been proposed, but all at the price of increased sensitivity to control errors. Alternatively, there exist theoretical proposals for speeding up HQC by the technique of "shortcut to adiabaticity" (STA), but no experimental demonstration has been reported so far, as these proposals involve a complicated control of four energy levels simultaneously. Here, we propose and experimentally demonstrate that HQC via shortcut to adiabaticity can be constructed with only three energy levels, using a superconducting qubit in a scalable architecture. With this scheme, all holonomic single-qubit operations can be realized nonadiabatically through a single cycle of state evolution. As a result, we are able to experimentally benchmark the stability of STA+HQC against NHQC in the same platform. The flexibility and simplicity of our scheme makes it also implementable on other systems, such as nitrogen-vacancy center, quantum dots, and nuclear magnetic resonance. Finally, our scheme can be extended to construct two-qubit holonomic entangling gates, leading to a universal set of STAHQC gates.

Nanowire Superinductance Fluxonium Qubit

We characterize a fluxonium qubit consisting of a Josephson junction inductively shunted with a NbTiN nanowire superinductance. We explain the measured energy spectrum by means of a multimode theory accounting for the distributed nature of the superinductance and the effect of the circuit nonlinearity to all orders in the Josephson potential. Using multiphoton Raman spectroscopy, we address multiple fluxonium transitions, observe multilevel Autler-Townes splitting and measure an excited state lifetime of T_{1}=20  μs. By measuring T_{1} at different magnetic flux values, we find a crossover in the lifetime limiting mechanism from capacitive to inductive losses.

Loss Mechanisms and Quasiparticle Dynamics in Superconducting Microwave Resonators Made of Thin-Film Granular Aluminum

Superconducting high kinetic inductance elements constitute a valuable resource for quantum circuit design and millimeter-wave detection. Granular aluminum (grAl) in the superconducting regime is a particularly interesting material since it has already shown a kinetic inductance in the range of nH/□ and its deposition is compatible with conventional Al/AlOx/Al Josephson junction fabrication. We characterize microwave resonators fabricated from grAl with a room temperature resistivity of 4×10^{3}  μΩ cm, which is a factor of 3 below the superconductor to insulator transition, showing a kinetic inductance fraction close to unity. The measured internal quality factors are on the order of Q_{i}=10^{5} in the single photon regime, and we demonstrate that nonequilibrium quasiparticles (QPs) constitute the dominant loss mechanism. We extract QP relaxation times in the range of 1 s and we observe QP bursts every ∼20  s. The current level of coherence of grAl resonators makes them attractive for integration in quantum devices, while it also evidences the need to reduce the density of nonequilibrium QPs.

Demonstration of Protection of a Superconducting Qubit from Energy Decay

Long-lived transitions occur naturally in atomic systems due to the abundance of selection rules inhibiting spontaneous emission. By contrast, transitions of superconducting artificial atoms typically have large dipoles, and hence their lifetimes are determined by the dissipative environment of a macroscopic electrical circuit. We designed a multilevel fluxonium artificial atom such that the qubit's transition dipole can be exponentially suppressed by flux tuning, while it continues to dispersively interact with a cavity mode by virtual transitions to the noncomputational states. Remarkably, energy decay time T_{1} grew by 2 orders of magnitude, proportionally to the inverse square of the transition dipole, and exceeded the benchmark value of T_{1}>2  ms (quality factor Q_{1}>4×10^{7}) without showing signs of saturation. The dephasing time was limited by the first-order coupling to flux noise to about 4  μs. Our circuit validated the general principle of hardware-level protection against bit-flip errors and can be upgraded to the 0-π circuit [P. Brooks, A. Kitaev, and J. Preskill, Phys. Rev. A 87, 052306 (2013)PLRAAN1050-294710.1103/PhysRevA.87.052306], adding protection against dephasing and certain gate errors.