Universal Fast-Flux Control of a Coherent, Low-Frequency Qubit

The heavy-fluxonium circuit is a promising building block for superconducting quantum processors due to its long relaxation and dephasing time at the flux-frustration point. However, the suppressed charge matrix elements and low transition frequency make it challenging to perform fast single-qubit g...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Helin Zhang, Srivatsan Chakram, Tanay Roy, Nathan Earnest, Yao Lu, Ziwen Huang, D. K. Weiss, Jens Koch, David I. Schuster
Format: article
Language:EN
Published: American Physical Society 2021
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doaj.org/article/76b2640a0f0c4316b0312514a26cd76a
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The heavy-fluxonium circuit is a promising building block for superconducting quantum processors due to its long relaxation and dephasing time at the flux-frustration point. However, the suppressed charge matrix elements and low transition frequency make it challenging to perform fast single-qubit gates using standard protocols. We report on new protocols for reset, fast coherent control, and readout that allow high-quality operation of the qubit with a 14 MHz transition frequency, an order of magnitude lower in energy than the ambient thermal energy scale. We utilize higher levels of the fluxonium to read out the qubit state and to initialize the qubit with 97% fidelity corresponding to cooling it to 190  μK. Instead of using standard microwave pulses, we control the qubit only with fast-flux pulses, generating control fields much larger than the qubit frequency. We develop a universal set of gates based on nonadiabatic Landau-Zener transitions that act in 20–60 ns, less than the single-qubit Larmor period. We measure qubit coherence of T_{1},T_{2e}∼300  μs for a fluxonium in a 2D architecture and realize single-qubit gates with an average gate fidelity of 99.8% as characterized by randomized benchmarking.