Harnessing techniques from analog signal processing, we establish a new path for large-scale quantum computation.

We describe and implement a family of entangling gates activated by radio-frequency flux modulation applied to a tunable transmon that is statically coupled to a neighboring transmon. The effect of this modulation is the resonant exchange of photons directly between levels of the two-transmon system, obviating the need for mediating qubits or resonator modes and allowing for the full utilization of all qubits in a scalable architecture. The resonance condition is selective in both the frequency and amplitude of modulation and thus alleviates frequency crowding. We demonstrate the use of three such resonances to produce entangling gates that enable universal quantum computation: one iSWAP gate and two distinct controlled Z gates. We report interleaved randomized benchmarking results indicating gate error rates of 6% for the iSWAP (duration 135ns) and 9% for the controlled Z gates (durations 175 ns and 270 ns), limited largely by qubit coherence.A central challenge in building a scalable quantum computer with superconducting qubits is the execution of high-fidelity, two-qubit gates within an architecture containing many resonant elements. As more elements are added, or as the multiplicity of couplings between elements is increased, the frequency space of the design becomes crowded and device performance suffers. In architectures composed of transmon qubits [1], there are two main approaches to implementing two-qubit gates. The first utilizes fixed-frequency qubits with static couplings where the two-qubit operations are activated by applying transverse microwave drives [2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. While fixedfrequency qubits generally have long coherence times, this architecture requires satisfying stringent constraints on qubit frequencies and anharmonicities [5,6,8] which requires some tunability to scale to many qubits [9]. The second approach relies on frequency-tunable transmons, and two-qubit gates are activated by tuning qubits into and out of resonance with a particular transition [10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. However, tunability comes at the cost of additional decoherence channels, thus significantly limiting coherence times [17]. In this approach the delivery of shaped unbalanced control signals poses a challenge [15]. Such gates are furthermore sensitive to frequency crowdingavoiding unwanted crossings with neighboring qubit energy levels during gate operations limits the flexibility and connectivity of the architecture.An alternative to these approaches is to modulate a circuit's couplings or energy levels at a frequency corresponding to the detuning between particular energy levels of interest [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]. This enables an entangling gate between a qubit and a single resonator [21,22], a qubit and many resonator modes [26], two transmon qubits coupled by a tunable mediating qubit [16,25], or two tunable transmons coupled to a mediating resonator [23,24].Building on these earlier results, we implement two entangling gates, iSWAP and controlled Z (CZ), between a flux-tunable transmon an...

Building a scalable quantum computer requires developing appropriate models to understand and verify its complex quantum dynamics. We focus on superconducting quantum processors based on transmons for which full numerical simulations are already challenging at the level of qubytes. It is thus highly desirable to develop accurate methods of modeling qubit networks that do not rely solely on numerical computations. Using systematic perturbation theory to large orders in the transmon regime, we derive precise analytic expressions of the transmon parameters. We apply our results to the case of parametrically-modulated transmons to study recently-implemented parametricallyactivated entangling gates. arXiv:1706.06566v2 [quant-ph]

We analyze the Purcell relaxation rate of a superconducting qubit coupled to a resonator, which is coupled to a transmission line and pumped by an external microwave drive. Considering the typical regime of the qubit measurement, we focus on the case when the qubit frequency is significantly detuned from the resonator frequency. Surprisingly, the Purcell rate decreases when the strength of the microwave drive is increased. This suppression becomes significant in the nonlinear regime.In the presence of the microwave drive, the loss of photons to the transmission line also causes excitation of the qubit; however, the excitation rate is typically much smaller than the relaxation rate. Our analysis also applies to a more general case of a two-level quantum system coupled to a cavity.

In state-of-the-art quantum computing platforms, including superconducting qubits and trapped ions, imperfections in the 2-qubit entangling gates are the dominant contributions of error to systemwide performance. Recently, a novel 2-qubit parametric gate was proposed and demonstrated with superconducting transmon qubits. This gate is activated through RF modulation of the transmon frequency and can be operated at an amplitude where the performance is first-order insensitive to flux-noise. In this work we experimentally validate the existence of this AC sweet spot and demonstrate its dependence on white noise power from room temperature electronics. With these factors in place, we measure coherence-limited entangling-gate fidelities as high as 99.2 ± 0.15%. * S. Hong, A. Papageorge, and P. Sivarajah contributed equally to this work.