Leakage from the computational subspace is a damaging source of noise that degrades the performance of most qubit types. Unlike other types of noise, leakage cannot be overcome by standard quantum error correction techniques and requires dedicated leakage reduction units. In this work, we study the effects of leakage mobility between superconducting qubits on the performance of a quantum stability experiment, which is a benchmark for fault-tolerant logical computation. Using the Fujitsu Quantum Simulator, we perform full density-matrix simulations of stability experiments implemented on the surface code. We observe improved performance with increased mobility, suggesting leakage mobility can itself act as a leakage reduction unit by naturally moving leakage from data to auxiliary qubits, where it is removed upon reset. We compare the performance of standard error-correction circuits with "patch wiggling", a specific leakage reduction technique where data and auxiliary qubits alternate their roles in each round of error correction. We observe that patch wiggling becomes inefficient with increased leakage mobility, in contrast to the improved performance of standard circuits. These observations suggest that the damage of leakage can be overcome by stimulating leakage mobility between qubits without the need for a dedicated leakage reduction unit.
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 parameterizin…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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）
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）
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…
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）
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…
RF-Budgeted Frame Compilation for Frequency-Multiplexed Superconducting-Qubit Control Using Qubit-Control Identity Records and a Circuit-Informed RFSoC Model
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility（托马斯·杰斐逊国家加速器设施）
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…
A practical quantum computer requires quantum bit (qubit) operations with low error rates in extensible architectures. We study a packaging method that makes it possible to address hundreds of superconducting qubits by means of three-dimensional wires: The large-scale quantum socket. A qubit chip is housed in a superconducting box, where both box and chip dimensions lead to unwanted modes that can interfere with qubit operations. We theoretically analyze these interference effects in the context of qubit coherent leakage. We propose two methods to mitigate the resulting errors by detuning the …
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…
Geometric phase is an indispensable element for achieving robust and high-fidelity quantum gates due to its built-in noise-resilience feature. However, due to the complexity of manipulation and the intrinsic leakage of the encoded quantum information to non-logical-qubit basis, the experimental realization of universal nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation is very difficult. Here, we propose to implement scalable nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation with decoherence-free subspace encoding on a two-dimensional square superconducting transmon-qubit lattice, where only the two-body int…
Protecting quantum information from errors is essential for large-scale quantum computation. Quantum error correction (QEC) encodes information in entangled states of many qubits, and performs parity measurements to identify errors without destroying the encoded information. However, traditional QEC cannot handle leakage from the qubit computational space. Leakage affects leading experimental platforms, based on trapped ions and superconducting circuits, which use effective qubits within many-level physical systems. We investigate how two-transmon entangled states evolve under repeated parity …
Minimizing phase and other errors in experimental quantum gates allows higher fidelity quantum processing. To quantify and correct for phase errors in particular, we have developed a new experimental metrology --- amplified phase error (APE) pulses --- that amplifies and helps identify phase errors in general multi-level qubit architectures. In order to correct for both phase and amplitude errors specific to virtual transitions and leakage outside of the qubit manifold, we implement "half derivative" an experimental simplification of derivative reduction by adiabatic gate (DRAG) control theory…
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…
Leakage Suppression in Quantum Control via Static Parameter Offsets
Key Laboratory of Atomic and Subatomic Structure and Quantum Control (Ministry of Education), Guangdong Basic Research Center of Excellence for Structure and Fundamental Interactions of Matter, and School of Physics, South China Normal University（原子与亚原子结构及量子控制重点实验室（教育部），广东省物质结构与基本相互作用卓越研究中心，华南师范大学物理学院）；Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Quantum Engineering and Quantum Materials, Guangdong-Hong Kong Joint Laboratory of Quantum Matter, and Frontier Research Institute for Physics, South China Normal University（广东省量子工程与量子材料重点实验室，广东-香港量子物质联合实验室，华南师范大学前沿物理研究院）
Stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) is a widely used protocol to realize high-fidelity and robust quantum control in various quantum systems. However, further application of this protocol in superconducting qubits is limited by population leakage caused by the only weak anharmonicity. Here we introduce an optimally controlled shortcut-to-adiabatic (STA) technique to speed up the STIRAP protocol in a superconducting qudit. By modifying the shapes of the STIRAP pulses, we experimentally realize a fast (32 ns) and high-fidelity quantum state transfer. In addition, we demonstrate that our …
The resonator-induced phase gate is a two-qubit operation in which driving a bus resonator induces a state-dependent phase shift on the qubits equivalent to an effective $ZZ$ interaction. In principle, the dispersive nature of the gate offers flexibility for qubit parameters. However, the drive can cause resonator and qubit leakage, the physics of which cannot be fully captured using either the existing Jaynes-Cummings or Kerr models. In this paper, we adopt an ab-initio model based on Josephson nonlinearity for transmon qubits. The ab-initio analysis agrees well with the Kerr model in terms o…
Photon-Number Conserved Universal Quantum Logic Employing Continuous-Time Quantum Walk on Dual-Rail Qubit Arrays
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；Shenzhen Institute for Quantum Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学量子科学工程学院）；Lanzhou University（兰州大学）；Cuiying Honors College, Lanzhou University（兰州大学萃英学院）；International Quantum Academy, Shenzhen（深圳国际量子研究院）
Binary-outcome measurements allow to determine whether a multi-level quantum system is in a certain state while preserving quantum coherence between all orthogonal states. In this paper, we explore different regimes of the dispersive readout of a three-level superconducting quantum system coupled to a microwave cavity in order to implement binary-outcome measurements. By designing identical cavity frequency shifts for the first and second excited states of the system, we realize strong projective binary-outcome measurements onto its ground state with a fidelity of $94.3\%$. Complemented with s…
Multimode Purcell Filter for Superconducting-Qubit Reset and Readout with Intrinsic Purcell Protection
Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院物理研究所凝聚态物理北京国家实验室）；School of Physical Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学物理科学学院）
Mathieu Control of the Effective Coupling in Superconducting Qubits
Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院物理研究所凝聚态物理国家实验室）；School of Physical Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学物理科学学院）；Beijing Key Laboratory of Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing, Beijing Academy of Quantum Information Sciences（北京容错量子计算北京市重点实验室，北京量子信息科学研究院）；Hefei National Laboratory（合肥国家实验室）
We present a systematic, perturbative method for correcting quantum gates to suppress errors that take the target system out of a chosen subspace. It addresses the generic problem of non-adiabatic errors in adiabatic evolution and state preparation, as well as general leakage errors due to spurious couplings to undesirable states. The method is based on the Magnus expansion: by correcting control pulses, we modify the Magnus expansion of an initially-given, imperfect unitary in such a way that the desired evolution is obtained. Applications to adiabatic quantum state transfer, superconducting …
A plug-and-play superconducting quantum controller at millikelvin temperatures enables exceeding 99.9% average gate fidelity
State Key Laboratory of Materials for Integrated Circuits, Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院上海微系统与信息研究所集成电路材料国家重点实验室）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Graduate School of Science, Tokyo University of Science（东京理科大学理学部研究生院）；RIKEN Center for Quantum Computing (RQC)（理化学研究所量子计算中心）
High-fidelity control of superconducting qubits requires the generation of microwave-frequency pulses precisely tailored on nanosecond timescales. These pulses are most commonly synthesized by up-converting and superimposing two narrow-band intermediate-frequency signals referred to as the in-phase (I) and quadrature (Q) components. While the calibration of their DC-offsets, relative amplitude and phase allows one to cancel unwanted sideband and carrier leakage, this IQ mixing approach suffers from the presence of additional spurious frequency components. Here, we experimentally study an alter…
Transducer leakage error suppression using invariant-based shortcut
School of Physics, Anhui University（安徽大学物理学院）；Laboratory for Advanced Computing and Intelligence Engineering（先进计算与智能工程实验室）；School of Physics, Zhengzhou University（郑州大学物理学院）；Institute of Quantum Materials and Physics, Henan Academy of Science（河南省科学院量子材料与物理研究所）
Utilizing optimal control to simulate a model Hamiltonian is an emerging strategy that leverages the intrinsic physics of a device with digital quantum simulation methods. Here we evaluate optimal control for probing the non-equilibrium properties of symmetry-protected topological (SPT) states simulated with superconducting hardware. Assuming a tunable transmon architecture, we cast evolution of these SPT states as a series of one- and two-site pulse optimization problems that are solved in the presence of leakage constraints. From the generated pulses, we numerical simulate time-dependent mel…
