Effects of the environment on quantum systems: decoherence, bound states and high impedance in superconducting circuits

Superconducting circuits in the quantum regime represent a viable platform for microwave quantum optics, quantum simulations and quantum computing. In the last two decades, a large effort brought this architecture from an academic curiosity to concrete technology.\ua0 In this thesis, we study the effects of the environment on superconducting circuits. We consider mainly two typologies of the environment. On one hand, we study the classical baths inevitably coupled to the circuits, in particular the substrate where they are fabricated and the highly attenuated coaxial lines used for controlling them, which are the main sources for decoherence. On the other hand, we study structured electromagnetic environments that shape the density of states for the circuits, modifying their energy structure and their excitation properties.\ua0\ua0 Defects on the substrate mechanically and electrically coupled to superconducting circuits, behave as a bath of two-level systems. We investigate the effects of the bath on a qubit fabricated on silicon. From a time trace with more than 2000 measurements of T1 and T2 (every 3 min for 60 h), we statistically infer a Lorentzian resonance signature of the bath. Moreover, measuring the residual population of the first excited state of the qubit, and tuning the photonic population in the line, we assess the thermal state of the bath, measuring a temperature of 56 mK. Furthermore, we investigate the mechanical coupling of the bath, saturating its state, strongly pumping neighbouring modes in a high finesse mechanical resonator. On a piezoelectric substrate, the travelling phonons, carry an electric component together with a lattice deformation. Therefore, superconducting circuits can be coupled to a phononic waveguide through which they release part of their energy. We design, fabricate and measure superconducting resonators on gallium arsenide, demonstrating the electromechanical coupling as the main source of decoherence.\ua0Concentrating on the effects of the photonic bath in the coaxial line, we design a qubit with a very large coupling to this bath compared to the bath of two-level fluctuators. In this limit, the scattering of a coherent photon by the qubit linearly depends on the photonic bath population. In this regime, the qubit can be used as a primary thermometer; we measured injected calibrated noise and the photon occupation of our input lines at different temperatures.\ua0 Finally, we implemented a slow-waveguide made of a linear chain of high impedance resonators. The excitation of two transmon qubits coupled to the waveguide is dressed with a photonic component, generating the hybrid excitation of atom-photon bound state. We spectroscopically investigated the first and second excitation subspaces of the system, and we demonstrated full frequency and time domain control, of these bound states. These results may help to improve the performance of superconducting circuits and their setup. Moreover, we hope that our experiment can provide tools for quantum thermodynamics and quantum simulation

Decoherence benchmarking of superconducting qubits

We benchmark the decoherence of superconducting qubits to examine the temporal stability of energy-relaxation and dephasing. By collecting statistics during measurements spanning multiple days, we find the mean parameters $\overline{T_{1}}$ = 49 $\mu$s and $\overline{T_{2}^{*}}$ = 95 $\mu$s, however, both of these quantities fluctuate explaining the need for frequent re-calibration in qubit setups. Our main finding is that fluctuations in qubit relaxation are local to the qubit and are caused by instabilities of near-resonant two-level-systems (TLS). Through statistical analysis, we determine switching rates of these TLS and observe the coherent coupling between an individual TLS and a transmon qubit. Finally, we find evidence that the qubit's frequency stability is limited by capacitance noise. Importantly, this produces a 0.8 ms limit on the pure dephasing which we also observe. Collectively, these findings raise the need for performing qubit metrology to examine the reproducibility of qubit parameters, where these fluctuations could affect qubit gate fidelity.Comment: 15 pages ArXiv version rev

Primary thermometry of propagating microwaves in the quantum regime

The ability to control and measure the temperature of propagating microwave modes down to very low temperatures is indispensable for quantum information processing, and may open opportunities for studies of heat transport at the nanoscale, also in the quantum regime. Here we propose and experimentally demonstrate primary thermometry of propagating microwaves using a transmon-type superconducting circuit. Our device operates continuously, with a sensitivity down to $4\times 10^{-4}$ photons/\sqrt{\mbox{Hz}} and a bandwidth of 40 MHz. We measure the thermal occupation of the modes of a highly attenuated coaxial cable in a range of 0.001 to 0.4 thermal photons, corresponding to a temperature range from 35 mK to 210 mK at a frequency around 5 GHz. To increase the radiation temperature in a controlled fashion, we either inject calibrated, wideband digital noise, or heat the device and its environment. This thermometry scheme can find applications in benchmarking and characterization of cryogenic microwave setups, temperature measurements in hybrid quantum systems, and quantum thermodynamics

Phononic loss in superconducting resonators on piezoelectric substrates

We numerically and experimentally investigate the phononic loss for superconducting resonators fabricated on a piezoelectric substrate. With the help of finite element method simulations, we calculate the energy loss due to electromechanical conversion into bulk and surface acoustic waves. This sets an upper limit for the resonator internal quality factor $Q_i$. To validate the simulation, we fabricate quarter wavelength coplanar waveguide resonators on GaAs and measure $Q_i$ as function of frequency, power and temperature. We observe a linear increase of $Q_i$ with frequency, as predicted by the simulations for a constant electromechanical coupling. Additionally, $Q_i$ shows a weak power dependence and a negligible temperature dependence around 10$\,$mK, excluding two level systems and non-equilibrium quasiparticles as the main source of losses at that temperature

Controlling Atom-Photon Bound States in an Array of Josephson-Junction Resonators

Engineering the electromagnetic environment of a quantum emitter gives rise to a plethora of exotic light -matter interactions. In particular, photonic lattices can seed long-lived atom-photon bound states inside photonic band gaps. Here, we report on the concept and implementation of a novel microwave architecture consisting of an array of compact superconducting resonators in which we have embedded two frequency -tunable artificial atoms. We study the atom-field interaction and access previously unexplored coupling regimes, in both the single-and double-excitation subspace. In addition, we demonstrate coherent interactions between two atom-photon bound states, in both resonant and dispersive regimes, that are suitable for the implementation of SWAP and CZ two-qubit gates. The presented architecture holds promise for quantum simulation with tunable-range interactions and photon transport experiments in the nonlinear regime

Controlling Atom-Photon Bound States in an Array of Josephson-Junction Resonators

Engineering the electromagnetic environment of a quantum emitter gives rise to a plethora of exotic light -matter interactions. In particular, photonic lattices can seed long-lived atom-photon bound states inside photonic band gaps. Here, we report on the concept and implementation of a novel microwave architecture consisting of an array of compact superconducting resonators in which we have embedded two frequency -tunable artificial atoms. We study the atom-field interaction and access previously unexplored coupling regimes, in both the single-and double-excitation subspace. In addition, we demonstrate coherent interactions between two atom-photon bound states, in both resonant and dispersive regimes, that are suitable for the implementation of SWAP and CZ two-qubit gates. The presented architecture holds promise for quantum simulation with tunable-range interactions and photon transport experiments in the nonlinear regime

Mitigation of frequency collisions in superconducting quantum processors

The reproducibility of qubit parameters is a challenge for scaling up superconducting quantum processors. Signal crosstalk imposes constraints on the frequency separation between neighboring qubits. The frequency uncertainty of transmon qubits arising from the fabrication process is attributed to deviations in the Josephson junction area, tunnel barrier thickness, and the qubit capacitor. We decrease the sensitivity to these variations by fabricating larger Josephson junctions and reduce the wafer-level standard deviation in resistance down to 2%. We characterize 32 identical transmon qubits and demonstrate the reproducibility of the qubit frequencies with a 40 MHz standard deviation (i.e. 1%) with qubit quality factors exceeding 2 million. We perform two-level-system (TLS) spectroscopy and observe no significant increase in the number of TLSs causing qubit relaxation. We further show by simulation that for our parametric-gate architecture, and accounting only for errors caused by the uncertainty of the qubit frequency, we can scale up to 100 qubits with an average of only 3 collisions between quantum-gate transition frequencies, assuming 2% crosstalk and 99.9% target gate fidelity.Comment: 8 figures, 18 pages (8 pages main text), units fixed in Fig. 1

Simplified Josephson-junction fabrication process for reproducibly high-performance superconducting qubits

We introduce a simplified fabrication technique for Josephson junctions and demonstrate superconducting Xmon qubits with T1 relaxation times averaging above 50 μs (Q > 1.5 7 1 0 6). Current shadow-evaporation techniques for aluminum-based Josephson junctions require a separate lithography step to deposit a patch that makes a galvanic, superconducting connection between the junction electrodes and the circuit wiring layer. The patch connection eliminates parasitic junctions, which otherwise contribute significantly to dielectric loss. In our patch-integrated cross-type junction technique, we use one lithography step and one vacuum cycle to evaporate both the junction electrodes and the patch. This eliminates a key bottleneck in manufacturing superconducting qubits by reducing the fabrication time and cost. In a study of more than 3600 junctions, we show an average resistance variation of 3.7% on a wafer that contains forty 0.5 7 0.5-cm2 chips, with junction areas ranging between 0.01 and 0.16 μm2. The average on-chip spread in resistance is 2.7%, with 20 chips varying between 1.4% and 2%. For the junction sizes used for transmon qubits, we deduce a wafer-level transition-frequency variation of 1.7%-2.5%. We show that 60%-70% of this variation is attributed to junction-area fluctuations, while the rest is caused by tunnel-junction inhomogeneity. Such high frequency predictability is a requirement for scaling-up the number of qubits in a quantum computer

Quantum efficiency, purity and stability of a tunable, narrowband microwave single-photon source

We demonstrate an on-demand source of microwave single photons with 71–99% intrinsic quantum efficiency. The source is narrowband (300 kHz) and tuneable over a 600 MHz range around 5.2 GHz. Such a device is an important element in numerous quantum technologies and applications. The device consists of a superconducting transmon qubit coupled to the open end of a transmission line. A π-pulse excites the qubit, which subsequently rapidly emits a single photon into the transmission line. A cancellation pulse then suppresses the reflected π-pulse by 33.5 dB, resulting in 0.005 photons leaking into the photon emission channel. We verify strong antibunching of the emitted photon field and determine its Wigner function. Non-radiative decay and 1/f flux noise both affect the quantum efficiency. We also study the device stability over time and identify uncorrelated discrete jumps of the pure dephasing rate at different qubit frequencies on a time scale of hours, which we attribute to independent two-level system defects in the device dielectrics, dispersively coupled to the qubit. Our single-photon source with only one input port is more compact and scalable compared to standard implementations