Reaching high speed, high fidelity qubit operations requires precise control over the shape of the underlying pulses. For weakly anharmonic systems, such as superconducting transmon qubits, short gates lead to leakage to states outside of the computational subspace. Control pulses designed with open-loop optimal control may reduce such leakage. However, model inaccuracies can severely limit the usability of such pulses. We implemented a closed-loop optimization that simultaneously adapts all control parameters based on measurements of a cost function built from Clifford gates. By parameterizing pulses with a piecewise-constant representation that matches the capabilities of the control hardware we create a $4.16~\rm{ns}$ single-qubit pulse with $99.76\,\%$ fidelity and $0.044\,\%$ leakage. This is a seven-fold reduction of the leakage rate of the best DRAG pulse we have calibrated at such short durations on the same system.
We introduce the sudden variant (SNZ) of the Net Zero scheme realizing controlled-$Z$ (CZ) gates by baseband flux control of transmon frequency. SNZ CZ gates operate at the speed limit of transverse coupling between computational and non-computational states by maximizing intermediate leakage. The key advantage of SNZ is tuneup simplicity, owing to the regular structure of conditional phase and leakage as a function of two control parameters. We realize SNZ CZ gates in a multi-transmon processor, achieving $99.93\pm0.24\%$ fidelity and $0.10\pm0.02\%$ leakage. SNZ is compatible with scalable s…
Non-Abelian geometric phases acquired in cyclic quantum evolution can be utilized as natural resources for constructing robust holonomic gates for quantum information processing. Recently, an extensible holonomic quantum computation (HQC) was proposed and demonstrated in a recent superconducting experiment [T. Yan et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 080501 (2019)]. However, for the weakly anharmonic system, this HQC was given of low gate fidelity due to leakage to states outside of the computational subspace. Here, we propose a scheme that to construct nonadiabatic holonomic gates via dynamical inva…
The majority of quantum error detection and correction protocols assume that the population in a qubit does not leak outside of its computational subspace. For many existing approaches, however, the physical qubits do possess more than two energy levels and consequently are prone to such leakage events. Analyzing the effects of leakage is therefore essential to devise optimal protocols for quantum gates, measurement, and error correction. In this work, we present a detailed study of leakage in a two-qubit superconducting stabilizer measurement circuit. We simulate the repeated ancilla-assisted…
Simple analytical flux-tuned iSWAP pulses for leakage suppression
Institute for Quantum Control (PGI-8), Forschungszentrum Jülich（于利希研究中心量子控制研究所）；Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Cologne（科隆大学理论物理研究所）；Institute for Functional Quantum System (PGI-13), Forschungszentrum Jülich（于利希研究中心功能量子系统研究所）；Department of Physics, RWTH Aachen University（亚琛工业大学物理系）
Superconducting Josephson junction qubits constitute the main current technology for many applications, including scalable quantum computers and thermal devices. Theoretical modeling of such systems is usually done within the two-level approximation. However, accurate theoretical modeling requires taking into account the influence of the higher excited states without limiting the system to the two-level qubit subspace. Here, we study the dynamics and control of a superconducting transmon using the numerically exact stochastic Liouville-von Neumann equation approach. We focus on the role of sta…
A common approach to realize conditional-phase (CZ) gates in transmon qubits relies on flux control of the qubit frequency to make computational states interact with non-computational ones using a fast-adiabatic trajectory to minimize leakage. We develop a bipolar flux-pulsing method with two key advantages over the traditional unipolar variant. First, the action of the bipolar pulse is robust to long-timescale linear-dynamical distortions in the flux-control line, facilitating tuneup and ensuring atomic repeatability. Second, the flux symmetry of the transmon Hamiltonian makes the conditional…
We propose an effective method to optimize the working parameters (WPs) of microwave-driven quantum logical gates implemented with multi-level physical qubits. We show that by treating transitions between each pair of levels independently, intrinsic gate errors due primarily to population leakage to undesired states can be estimated accurately from spectroscopic properties of the qubits and minimized by choosing appropriate WPs. The validity and efficiency of the approach are demonstrated by applying it to optimize the WPs of two coupled rf SQUID flux qubits for controlled-NOT (CNOT) operation…
It is an open question if there are leakage-free entangling Fibonacci braiding gates. We provide evidence to the conjecture for the negative in this paper. We also found a much simpler protocol to generate approximately leakage-free entangling Fibonacci braiding gates than existing algorithms in the literature.
We present a general framework for the quantification and characterization of leakage errors that result when a quantum system is encoded in the subspace of a larger system. To do this we introduce new metrics for quantifying the coherent and incoherent properties of the resulting errors, and we illustrate this framework with several examples relevant to superconducting qubits. In particular, we propose two quantities: the leakage and seepage rates, which together with average gate fidelity allow for characterizing the average performance of quantum gates in the presence of leakage and show ho…
Parametric DRAG for leakage-suppressed exchange gates in superconducting qubits
National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures, School of Physics, Nanjing University（南京大学固体微结构物理学院）；Shishan Laboratory, Suzhou Campus of Nanjing University（南京大学苏州校区石崑实验室）；Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Quantum Information Science and Technology, Nanjing University（南京大学江苏省量子信息科学与技术重点实验室）；Synergetic Innovation Center of Quantum Information and Quantum Physics, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学量子信息与量子物理协同创新中心）；Hefei National Laboratory（合肥国家实验室）
Leakage outside of the qubit computational subspace poses a threatening challenge to quantum error correction (QEC). We propose a scheme using two leakage-reduction units (LRUs) that mitigate these issues for a transmon-based surface code, without requiring an overhead in terms of hardware or QEC-cycle time as in previous proposals. For data qubits we consider a microwave drive to transfer leakage to the readout resonator, where it quickly decays, ensuring that this negligibly affects the coherence within the computational subspace for realistic system parameters. For ancilla qubits we apply a…
Spectator Leakage Suppression via Invariant Subspace Engineering for CZ Gates in Superconducting Quantum Circuits
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；CAS Center For Excellence in Quantum Information and Quantum Physics（中国科学院量子信息与量子物理前沿卓越创新中心）；Suzhou Institute for Advanced Research, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学苏州高等研究院）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心人工智能研究院）
For superconducting qubits, microwave pulses drive rotations around the Bloch sphere. The phase of these drives can be used to generate zero-duration arbitrary "virtual" Z-gates which, combined with two $X_{π/2}$ gates, can generate any SU(2) gate. Here we show how to best utilize these virtual Z-gates to both improve algorithms and correct pulse errors. We perform randomized benchmarking using a Clifford set of Hadamard and Z-gates and show that the error per Clifford is reduced versus a set consisting of standard finite-duration X and Y gates. Z-gates can correct unitary rotation errors for …
Improved error correction with leakage reduction units built into qubit measurement in a superconducting quantum processor
QuTech（夸特克）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；Kavli Institute of Nanoscience, Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学卡弗里纳米科学研究所）；SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research（荷兰空间研究协会）
Superconducting qubits, while promising for scalability and long coherence times, contain more than two energy levels, and therefore are susceptible to errors generated by the leakage of population outside of the computational subspace. Such leakage errors constitute a prominent roadblock towards fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) with superconducting qubits. FTQC using topological codes is based on sequential measurements of multiqubit stabilizer operators. Here, we first propose a leakage-resilient procedure to perform repetitive measurements of multiqubit stabilizer operators, and then…
We use a gradient-based optimization scheme to find single-qubit rotations to be interwoven between timesteps of a noisy logical two-qubit entangling gate in order to suppress arbitrary logical and leakage errors in the two-qubit gate. We show how the sequence fidelity is affected by imperfections in the single-qubit operations, as well as by various relative strengths of the logical and leakage noise. Our approach is completely general and system-independent, allowing for application to any two-qubit system regardless of the experimental implementation details.
Randomized Benchmarking allows to efficiently and scalably characterize the average error of an unitary 2-design such as the Clifford group $\mathcal{C}$ on a physical candidate for quantum computation, as long as there are no non-computational leakage levels in the system. We investigate the effect of leakage errors on Randomized Benchmarking induced from an additional level per physical qubit and provide a modified protocol that allows to derive reliable estimates for the error per gate in their presence. We assess the variance of the sequence fidelity corresponding to the number of random s…
Randomized benchmarking (RB) is a powerful method for determining the error rate of experimental quantum gates. Traditional RB, however, is restricted to gatesets, such as the Clifford group, that form a unitary 2-design. The recently introduced character RB can benchmark more general gates using techniques from representation theory; up to now, however, this method has only been applied to "multiplicity-free" groups, a mathematical restriction on these groups. In this paper, we extend the original character RB derivation to explicitly treat non-multiplicity-free groups, and derive several app…
Many realizations of solid-state qubits involve couplings to leakage states lying outside the computational subspace, posing a threat to high-fidelity quantum gate operations. Mitigating leakage errors is especially challenging when the coupling strength is unknown, e.g., when it is caused by noise. Here we show that simple pulse sequences can be used to strongly suppress leakage errors for a qubit embedded in a three-level system. As an example, we apply our scheme to the recently proposed charge quadrupole (CQ) qubit for quantum dots. These results provide a solution to a key challenge for f…
Purcell-Engineered Hybrid Coupler for Leakage-Suppressed Robust CZ Gates
Zhejiang Qizhen Quantum Technology Co（浙江启真量子科技有限公司）；Institute of Quantum Sensing, Zhejiang University（浙江大学量子传感研究所）；Key Laboratory of Opto-electronic Technology, Ministry of Education, Beijing University of Technology（北京工业大学光电技术教育部重点实验室）；Hunan Normal University（湖南师范大学）
Spin qubits in silicon quantum dots are one of the most promising building blocks for large scale quantum computers thanks to their high qubit density and compatibility with the existing semiconductor technologies. High fidelity single-qubit gates exceeding the threshold of error correction codes like the surface code have been demonstrated, while two-qubit gates have reached 98\% fidelity and are improving rapidly. However, there are other types of error --- such as charge leakage and propagation --- that may occur in quantum dot arrays and which cannot be corrected by quantum error correctio…
Leakage benchmarking with decohering subgroups in the presence of preparation and measurement errors
National Institute of Standards and Technology（美国国家标准与技术研究院）；University of Colorado, Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校）；Center for Theory of Quantum Matter, University of Colorado, Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校量子物质理论中心）
Low-leakage superconducting-qubit measurement with sub-100-ns total duration
RIKEN Center for Quantum Computing (RQC)（理化学研究所量子计算中心）；Department of Applied Physics, Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo（东京大学大学院工学系研究科应用物理学科）
Quantum computing can become scalable through error correction, but logical error rates only decrease with system size when physical errors are sufficiently uncorrelated. During computation, unused high energy levels of the qubits can become excited, creating leakage states that are long-lived and mobile. Particularly for superconducting transmon qubits, this leakage opens a path to errors that are correlated in space and time. Here, we report a reset protocol that returns a qubit to the ground state from all relevant higher level states. We test its performance with the bit-flip stabilizer co…
Readout-Induced Leakage in Superconducting Circuits with Nonlinear Couplings
Yale University（耶鲁大学）；Yale Quantum Institute, Yale University（耶鲁量子研究所，耶鲁大学）；University of California Santa Barbara（加州大学圣塔芭芭拉分校）；Google Quantum AI（谷歌量子AI）
Leakage errors occur when a quantum system leaves the two-level qubit subspace. Reducing these errors is critically important for quantum error correction to be viable. To quantify leakage errors, we use randomized benchmarking in conjunction with measurement of the leakage population. We characterize single qubit gates in a superconducting qubit, and by refining our use of Derivative Reduction by Adiabatic Gate (DRAG) pulse shaping along with detuning of the pulses, we obtain gate errors consistently below $10^{-3}$ and leakage rates at the $10^{-5}$ level. With the control optimized, we find…
We propose to use the continuous version of the quantum Zeno effect to eliminate leakage to higher energy states in superconducting quantum computing architectures based on Josephson phase and flux qubits. We are particularly interested in the application of this approach to the single-step Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state protocol described in [A. Galiautdinov and J. M. Martinis, Phys. Rev. A 78, 010305(R) (2008)]. While being conceptually appealing, the protocol was found to be plagued with a number of spectral crowding and leakage problems. Here we argue that by coupling the qubits t…
Realizing leakage elimination operator-based adiabatic speedup on a superconducting quantum processor
College of Physics and Optoelectronic Engineering, Ocean University of China（中国海洋大学物理与光电工程学院）；China Mobile (Suzhou) Software Technology Co., Ltd（中国移动（苏州）软件技术有限公司）；School of Sciences, Qingdao University of Technology（青岛理工大学理学院）
Quantum algorithms often benefit from the ability to execute multi-qubit (>2) gates. To date such multi-qubit gates are typically decomposed into single- and two-qubit gates, particularly in superconducting qubit architectures. The ability to perform multi-qubit operations in a single step could vastly improve the fidelity and execution time of many algorithms. Here, we propose a single shot method for executing an i-Toffoli gate, a three-qubit gate gate with two control and one target qubit, using currently existing superconducting hardware. We show numerical evidence for a process fidelity o…
Leakage errors damage a qubit by coupling it to other levels. Over the years, several theoretical approaches to dealing with such errors have been developed based on perturbation arguments. Here we propose a different strategy: we use a sequence of finite rotation gates to exactly eliminate leakage errors. The strategy is illustrated by the recently proposed charge quadrupole qubit in a triple quantum dot, where there are two logical states to support the qubit and one leakage state. We have found an su(2) subalgebra in the three-level system, and by using the subalgebra we show that ideal Pau…
We propose a way for realizing a two-qubit controlled phase gate with superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) coupled to a superconducting resonator. In this proposal, the two lowest levels of each SQUID serve as the logical states and two intermediate levels of each SQUID are used for the gate realization. We show that neither adjustment of SQUID level spacings during the gate operation nor uniformity in SQUID parameters is required by this proposal. In addition, this proposal does not require the adiabatic passage or a second-order detuning and thus the gate is much faster.
Nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation has received increasing attention due to its robustness against control errors as well as high-speed realization. The original protocol of nonadiabatic holonomic one-qubit gates has been experimentally demonstrated with superconducting transmon qutrit. However, the original protocol requires two noncommuting gates to realize an arbitrary one-qubit gate, which doubles the exposure time of gates to error sources and therefore makes the gates vulnerable to environment-induced decoherence. Single-shot protocol was subsequently proposed to realize an arbit…
We propose how to realize a three-step controlled-phase gate of one superconducting qubit simultaneously controlling n qubits selected from N qubits in a cavity (1<n<N). The operation time of this gate is independent of the number n of qubits involved in the gate operation. This phase gate controlling at once n qubits is insensitive to the initial state of the cavity mode and can be used to produce an analogous CNOT gate simultaneously acting on n qubits.
A scheme for coupling superconducting charge qubits via a one-dimensional superconducting transmission line resonator is proposed. The qubits are working at their optimal points, where they are immune to the charge noise and possess long decoherence time. Analysis on the dynamical time evolution of the interaction is presented, which is shown to be insensitive to the initial state of the resonator field. This scheme enables fast gate operation and is readily scalable to multiqubit scenario.
Fast robust two-qubit gate operation with low susceptibility to crosstalk are the key to scalable quantum information processing. Parametrically driven gate is inherently insensitive to crosstalk while superadiabatic control can speed up the gate without losing accuracy. We propose and experimentally implement superadiabatic two-qubit gates using parametric modulation on superconducting quantum circuits. Our results demonstrate the preservation of adiabaticity at a gate speed close to the quantum limit, in addition to robustness against control instability. We demonstrate a CZ gate with error …
Scalability of today's superconducting quantum computers is limited due to the huge costs of generating/routing microwave control pulses per qubit from room temperature. One active research area in both industry and academia is to push the classical controllers to the dilution refrigerator in order to increase the scalability of quantum computers. Superconducting Single Flux Quantum (SFQ) is a classical logic technology with low power consumption and ultra-high speed, and thus is a promising candidate for in-fridge classical controllers with maximized scalability. Prior work has demonstrated h…
High-quality-factor 3D cavities in superconducting circuits are ideal candidates for bosonic logical qubits as their fidelity is limited only by the low photon loss rate. However, the transmon qubits that are used to manipulate bosonic qubits result in the emergence of additional relaxation and dephasing channels. In this work, a numerical study is performed to elucidate the effect of the various loss channels on the performance of logical gates on a bosonic qubit. A gate error model is developed that encapsulates the loss mechanisms for arbitrary gate operations and predicts experimentally ac…
Impact of leakage on the dynamics of a ST$_0$ qubit implemented in a Double Quantum Dot device
Tecnun - University of Navarra（塔库纳-纳瓦拉大学）；Donostia International Physics Center（圣塞巴斯蒂安国际物理中心）；Cavendish Laboratory, Department of Physics, University of Cambridge（剑桥大学物理系卡文迪许实验室）；Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory（日立剑桥实验室）
Quantum gates based on geometric phases possess intrinsic noise-resilience features and therefore attract much attention. However, the implementations of previous geometric quantum computation typically require a long pulse time of gates. As a result, their experimental control inevitably suffers from the cumulative disturbances of systematic errors due to excessive time consumption. Here, we experimentally implement a set of noncyclic and nonadiabatic geometric quantum gates in a superconducting circuit, which greatly shortens the gate time. And also, we experimentally verify that our univers…
