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Fast universal control of an oscillator with weak dispersive coupling to a qubit

Nature Physics volume 18, pages 1464–1469 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Full manipulation of a quantum system requires controlled evolution generated by nonlinear interactions, which is coherent when the rate of nonlinearity is large compared with the rate of decoherence. As a result, engineered quantum systems typically rely on a bare nonlinearity much stronger than decoherence rates, and this hierarchy is usually assumed to be necessary. Here we challenge this assumption by demonstrating the universal control of a quantum system where the rate of bare nonlinear interaction is comparable to the fastest rate of decoherence. We introduce a noise-resilient protocol for the universal quantum control of a nearly harmonic oscillator that takes advantage of an in situ enhanced nonlinearity instead of harnessing a bare nonlinearity. Our experiment consists of a high-quality-factor microwave cavity with weak dispersive coupling to a superconducting qubit with much lower quality. By using strong drives to temporarily excite the oscillator, we realize an amplified three-wave-mixing interaction, achieving typical operation speeds over an order of magnitude faster than expected from the bare dispersive coupling. Our demonstrations include the preparation of a single-photon state with high fidelity, the generation of squeezed vacuum with large intracavity squeezing and measurement-free preparation of logical states for the binomial and Gottesman–Kitaev–Preskill quantum error-correcting codes.

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Fig. 1: ECD control.
Fig. 2: Fock state preparation.
Fig. 3: Preparation of squeezed states and bosonic code words.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.

Code availability

The code used for gate and pulse optimization is available via GitHub at https://github.com/alec-eickbusch/ECD_control.

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Acknowledgements

We thank N. Frattini, R. Cortiñas, C. Flühmann and X. Xiao for helpful discussions. We are grateful to J. Curtis and B. Kalfus for technical assistance and I. Tsioutsios and L. Frunzio for device fabrication assistance. We thank M. Hays, B. Brock, J. Teoh, C. Wang, A. Maiti, P. Campagne-Ibarcq, S. Touzard and S. Rosenblum for helpful feedback. This research was sponsored by the Army Research Office (ARO) under grant nos. W911NF-18-1-0212, W911NF-16-1-0349 and W911NF-18-1-0020 and by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under grant no. FA9550-19-1-0399. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Army Research Office (ARO) or the US Government. The US Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation herein.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departments of Applied Physics and Physics, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Alec Eickbusch, Volodymyr Sivak, Andy Z. Ding, Salvatore S. Elder, Shantanu R. Jha, Jayameenakshi Venkatraman, Baptiste Royer, S. M. Girvin, Robert J. Schoelkopf & Michel H. Devoret

  2. Yale Quantum Institute, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Alec Eickbusch, Volodymyr Sivak, Andy Z. Ding, Salvatore S. Elder, Shantanu R. Jha, Jayameenakshi Venkatraman, Baptiste Royer, S. M. Girvin, Robert J. Schoelkopf & Michel H. Devoret

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Contributions

A.E., S.S.E., M.H.D. and R.J.S. developed the large displacement control method. A.E., S.R.J., V.S. and A.Z.D. implemented the numerical ECD parameter optimization. A.E., V.S. and A.Z.D. conducted the measurements. A.E., B.R., V.S. and S.M.G. developed the theory. J.V. and A.E. performed the numerical analysis of the strongly driven nonlinear oscillator. A.E. and M.H.D. wrote the manuscript with feedback from all the authors.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Alec Eickbusch or Michel H. Devoret.

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Competing interests

R.J.S. and M.H.D. are founders and R.J.S. is a shareholder of Quantum Circuits. The remaining authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Physics thanks Christian Andersen and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Figs. 1–12, Sections 1–10 and Tables 1–3.

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Eickbusch, A., Sivak, V., Ding, A.Z. et al. Fast universal control of an oscillator with weak dispersive coupling to a qubit. Nat. Phys. 18, 1464–1469 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-022-01776-9

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