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Ionizing radiation has been shown to reduce the performance of superconducting quantum circuits. In this report, we evaluate the expected contributions of different sources of ambient radioactivity for typical superconducting qubit experiment platforms. Our assessment of radioactivity inside a typical cryostat highlights the importance of selecting appropriate materials for the experiment components nearest to qubit devices, such as packaging and electrical interconnects. We present a shallow underground facility (30-meter water equivalent) to reduce the flux of cosmic rays and a lead shielded cryostat to abate the naturally occurring radiogenic gamma-ray flux in the laboratory environment. We predict that superconducting qubit devices operated in this facility could experience a reduced rate of correlated multi-qubit errors by a factor of approximately 20 relative to the rate in a typical above-ground, unshielded facility. Finally, we outline overall design improvements that would be required to further reduce the residual ionizing radiation rate, down to the limit of current generation direct detection dark matter experiments., Comment: 36 pages, 9 figures, 9 tables including appendices. To be submitted to the Journal of Instrumentation

We present a detailed study of the coherence of a tunable capacitively-shunted flux qubit, designed for coherent quantum annealing applications. The measured relaxation at the qubit symmetry point is mainly due to intrinsic flux noise in the main qubit loop for qubit frequencies below $\sim3~\text{GHz}$. At higher frequencies, thermal noise in the bias line makes a significant contribution to the relaxation, arising from the design choice to experimentally explore both fast annealing and high-frequency control. The measured dephasing rate is primarily due to intrinsic low-frequency flux noise in the two qubit loops, with additional contribution from the low-frequency noise of control electronics used for fast annealing. The flux-bias dependence of the dephasing time also reveals apparent noise correlation between the two qubit loops, possibly due to non-local sources of flux noise or junction critical-current noise. Our results are relevant for ongoing efforts toward building superconducting quantum annealers with increased coherence., Comment: 18 pages, 10 figures

Flux tunability is an important engineering resource for superconducting circuits. Large-scale quantum computers based on flux-tunable superconducting circuits face the problem of flux crosstalk, which needs to be accurately calibrated to realize high-fidelity quantum operations. Typical calibration methods either assume that circuit elements can be effectively decoupled and simple models can be applied, or require a large amount of data. Such methods become ineffective as the system size increases and circuit interactions become stronger. Here we propose a new method for calibrating flux crosstalk, which is independent of the underlying circuit model. Using the fundamental property that superconducting circuits respond periodically to external fluxes, crosstalk calibration of N flux channels can be treated as N independent optimization problems, with the objective functions being the periodicity of a measured signal depending on the compensation parameters. We demonstrate this method on a small-scale quantum annealing circuit based on superconducting flux qubits, achieving comparable accuracy with previous methods. We also show that the objective function usually has a nearly convex landscape, allowing efficient optimization.

Landau-Zener (LZ) tunneling, describing transitions in a two-level system during a sweep through an anti-crossing, is a model applicable to a wide range of physical phenomena, such as atomic collisions, chemical reactions, and molecular magnets, and has been extensively studied theoretically and experimentally. Dissipation due to coupling between the system and environment is an important factor in determining the transition rates. Here we report experimental results on the dissipative LZ transition. Using a tunable superconducting flux qubit, we observe for the first time the crossover from weak to strong coupling to the environment. The weak coupling limit corresponds to small system-environment coupling and leads to environment-induced thermalization. In the strong coupling limit, environmental excitations dress the system and transitions occur between the dressed states. Our results confirm previous theoretical studies of dissipative LZ tunneling in the weak and strong coupling limits. Our results for the intermediate regime are novel and could stimulate further theoretical development of open system dynamics. This work provides insight into the role of open system effects on quantum annealing, which employs quantum tunneling to search for low-energy solutions to hard computational problems., Comment: 18 pages, 12 figures

Magnetic flux tunability is an essential feature in most approaches to quantum computing based on superconducting qubits. Independent control of the fluxes in multiple loops is hampered by crosstalk. Calibrating flux crosstalk becomes a challenging task when the circuit elements interact strongly. We present a novel approach to flux crosstalk calibration, which is circuit model independent and relies on an iterative process to gradually improve calibration accuracy. This method allows us to reduce errors due to the inductive coupling between loops. The calibration procedure is automated and implemented on devices consisting of tunable flux qubits and couplers with up to 27 control loops. We devise a method to characterize the calibration error, which is used to show that the errors of the measured crosstalk coefficients are all below 0.17%., Comment: 22 pages, 15 figures

Dynamical decoupling (DD) is a widely-used quantum control technique that takes advantage of temporal symmetries in order to partially suppress quantum errors without the need resource-intensive error detection and correction protocols. This and other open-loop error mitigation techniques are critical for quantum information processing in the era of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum technology. However, despite its utility, dynamical decoupling does not address errors which occur at unstructured times during a circuit, including certain commonly-encountered noise mechanisms such as cross-talk and imperfectly calibrated control pulses. Here, we introduce and demonstrate an alternative technique - `quantum measurement emulation' (QME) - that effectively emulates the measurement of stabilizer operators via stochastic gate application, leading to a first-order insensitivity to coherent errors. The QME protocol enables error suppression based on the stabilizer code formalism without the need for costly measurements and feedback, and it is particularly well-suited to discrete coherent errors that are challenging for DD to address.

Spins in semiconductor quantum dots are a candidate for cryogenic quantum processors due to their exceptionally long coherence times. One major challenge to scaling quantum dot spin qubits is the dense wiring requirements, making it difficult to envision fabricating large arrays of nearest-neighbor-coupled qubits necessary for error correction. We describe a method to solve this problem by spacing the qubits out using high-impedance superconducting resonators with a 2D grid unit cell area of $0.16~\text{mm}^2$ using 3D integration. To prove the viability of this approach, we demonstrate 3D integration of a high-impedance TiN resonator coupled to a double quantum dot in a Si/SiGe heterostructure. Using the resonator as a dispersive gate sensor, we tune the device down to the single electron regime with an SNR = 5.36 limited by the resonator-dot capacitance. Characterization of the dot and resonator systems shows such integration can be done while maintaining low charge noise metrics for the quantum dots and with improved loaded quality factors for the superconducting resonator ($Q_L = 2.14 \times 10^4$), allowing for high-sensitivity charge detection and the potential for high fidelity 2-qubit gates. This work paves the way for 2D quantum dot qubit arrays with cavity mediated interactions., Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures

Developing a packaging scheme that meets all of the requirements for operation of solid-state qubits in a cryogenic environment can be a formidable challenge. In this article, we discuss work being done in our group as well as in the broader community, focusing on the role of 3D integration and packaging in quantum processing with solid-state qubits.

As the field of superconducting quantum computing advances from the few-qubit stage to larger-scale processors, qubit addressability and extensibility will necessitate the use of 3D integration and packaging. While 3D integration is well-developed for commercial electronics, relatively little work has been performed to determine its compatibility with high-coherence solid-state qubits. Of particular concern, qubit coherence times can be suppressed by the requisite processing steps and close proximity of another chip. In this work, we use a flip-chip process to bond a chip with superconducting flux qubits to another chip containing structures for qubit readout and control. We demonstrate that high qubit coherence ($T_1$, $T_{2,\rm{echo}} > 20\,\mu$s) is maintained in a flip-chip geometry in the presence of galvanic, capacitive, and inductive coupling between the chips.

The scalable application of quantum information science will stand on reproducible and controllable high-coherence quantum bits (qubits). Here, we revisit the design and fabrication of the superconducting flux qubit, achieving a planar device with broad frequency tunability, strong anharmonicity, high reproducibility, and relaxation times in excess of $40\,\mu$s at its flux-insensitive point. Qubit relaxation times $T_1$ across 22 qubits are consistently matched with a single model involving resonator loss, ohmic charge noise, and 1/f flux noise, a noise source previously considered primarily in the context of dephasing. We furthermore demonstrate that qubit dephasing at the flux-insensitive point is dominated by residual thermal photons in the readout resonator. The resulting photon shot noise is mitigated using a dynamical decoupling protocol, resulting in $T_2\approx 85\,\mu$s, approximately the $2T_1$ limit. In addition to realizing an improved flux qubit, our results uniquely identify photon shot noise as limiting $T_2$ in contemporary qubits based on transverse qubit-resonator interaction.

We present a systematic study of the first excited-state population in a 3D transmon qubit mounted in a dilution refrigerator with a variable temperature. Using a modified version of the protocol developed by Geerlings et al. [1], we observe the excited-state population to be consistent with a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, i.e., a qubit in thermal equilibrium with the refrigerator, over the temperature range 35-150 mK. Below 35 mK, the excited-state population saturates to 0.1%, near the resolution of our measurement. We verified this result using a flux qubit with ten-times stronger coupling to its readout resonator. We conclude that these qubits have effective temperature T_{eff} = 35 mK. Assuming T_{eff} is due solely to hot quasiparticles, the inferred qubit lifetime is 108 us and in plausible agreement with the measured 80 us.

We report a measurement of the modification of the effective precession frequency of polarized 3He atoms in response to a dressing field in a room temperature cell. The 3He atoms were polarized using the metastability spin-exchange method. An oscillating dressing field is then applied perpendicular to the constant magnetic field. Modification of the 3He effective precession frequency was observed over a broad range of the amplitude and frequency of the dressing field. The observed effects are compared with calculations based on quantum optics formalism., Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures