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Coherent control of a hybrid superconducting circuit made with graphene-based van der Waals heterostructures

Nature Nanotechnology volume 14, pages 120–125 (2019)Cite this article

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Abstract

Quantum coherence and control is foundational to the science and engineering of quantum systems1,2. In van der Waals materials, the collective coherent behaviour of carriers has been probed successfully by transport measurements3,4,5,6. However, temporal coherence and control, as exemplified by manipulating a single quantum degree of freedom, remains to be verified. Here we demonstrate such coherence and control of a superconducting circuit incorporating graphene-based Josephson junctions. Furthermore, we show that this device can be operated as a voltage-tunable transmon qubit7,8,9, whose spectrum reflects the electronic properties of massless Dirac fermions travelling ballistically4,5. In addition to the potential for advancing extensible quantum computing technology, our results represent a new approach to studying van der Waals materials using microwave photons in coherent quantum circuits.

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Fig. 1: Fabrication of graphene transmon qubits.
Fig. 2: Spectroscopy of a graphene transmon qubit.
Fig. 3: Rabi oscillation and energy relaxation of a graphene qubit.
Fig. 4: Qubit dephasing and Ramsey measurement.

Data availability

The data that support the plots within this paper and other finding of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank M. Augeri, J. Birenbaum, P. Baldo, G. Fitch, M. Hellstrom, K. Magoon, A. Melville, P. Murphy, B. M. Niedzielski, B. Osadchy, D. Rosenberg, R. Slattery, C. Thoummaraj and D. Volfson at MIT Lincoln Laboratory for technical assistance. This research was funded in part by the US Army Research Office grant no. W911NF-17-S-0001, and by the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research & Engineering via MIT Lincoln Laboratory under Air Force contract no. FA8721-05-C-0002. P.J.-H. and L.B. were partly supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s EPiQS Initiative through grant no. GBMF4541. L.B. acknowledges support of Agence Nationale de la Recherche through grant ANR-18-CE47-0012 (JCJC QIPHSC). This work made use of the MRSEC Shared Experimental Facilities at MIT, supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under award no. DMR-14-19807 and of Harvard CNS, supported by NSF ECCS under award no. 1541959. Growth of BN crystals was supported by the Elemental Strategy Initiative conducted by the MEXT, Japan and JSPS KAKENHI grant numbers JP15K21722 and JP25106006. D.R.-L. acknowledges support from Obra Social ‘la Caixa’ Fellowship. M.K. acknowledges support from the Carlsberg Foundation. The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements of the US Government.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Joel I-Jan Wang, Daniel Rodan-Legrain.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Joel I-Jan Wang, Daniel L. Campbell, Bharath Kannan, Morten Kjaergaard, Philip Krantz, Fei Yan, Terry P. Orlando, Simon Gustavsson & William D. Oliver

  2. Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Daniel Rodan-Legrain, Pablo Jarillo-Herrero & William D. Oliver

  3. Laboratoire des Solides Irradiés, Ecole Polytechnique, CNRS, CEA, Palaiseau, France

    Landry Bretheau

  4. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Bharath Kannan, Gabriel O. Samach & Terry P. Orlando

  5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, MA, USA

    David Kim, Gabriel O. Samach, Jonilyn L. Yoder & William D. Oliver

  6. Advanced Materials Laboratory, National Institute for Materials Science, Tsukuba, Japan

    Kenji Watanabe & Takashi Taniguchi

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Contributions

J.I.-J.W., L.B., S.G., T.P.O., P.J.-H. and W.D.O. conceived and designed the experiment. D.R.-L. and J.I.-J.W. fabricated the graphene devices. J.I.-J.W., F.Y. and S.G. conducted the measurements and analysed the data. D.K., G.O.S. and J.L.Y. supported sample fabrication. D.L.C., B.K., M.K. and P.K. supported measurements. K.W. and T.T. supplied the hBN crystals. J.I.-J.W., S.G. and W.D.O. wrote the manuscript. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Joel I-Jan Wang, Pablo Jarillo-Herrero or William D. Oliver.

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Supplementary Figs. 1–3

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Wang, J.IJ., Rodan-Legrain, D., Bretheau, L. et al. Coherent control of a hybrid superconducting circuit made with graphene-based van der Waals heterostructures. Nature Nanotech 14, 120–125 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-018-0329-2

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