Vibration-induced electrical noise in a cryogen-free dilution refrigerator: characterization, mitigation, and impact on qubit coherence

Abstract

Cryogen-free low-temperature setups are becoming more prominent in experimental science due to their convenience and reliability, and concern about the increasing scarcity of helium as a natural resource. Despite not having any moving parts at the cold end, pulse tube cryocoolers introduce vibrations that can be detrimental to the experiments. We characterize the coupling of these vibrations to the electrical signal observed on cables installed in a cryogen-free dilution refrigerator. The dominant electrical noise is in the 5 to 10 kHz range and its magnitude is found to be strongly temperature dependent. We test the performance of different cables designed to diagnose and tackle the noise, and find triboelectrics to be the dominant mechanism coupling the vibrations to the electrical signal. Flattening a semi-rigid cable or jacketing a flexible cable in order to restrict movement within the cable, successfully reduces the noise level by over an order of magnitude. Furthermore, we characterize the effect of the pulse tube vibrations on an electron spin qubit device in this setup. Coherence measurements are used to map out the spectrum of the noise experienced by the qubit, revealing spectral components matching the spectral signature of the pulse tube.

13 pages, 10 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Electrically controlling single spin qubits in a continuous microwave field
• Vibration-induced field fluctuations in a superconducting magnet
• Reducing current noise in cryogenic experiments by vacuum-insulated cables

Cited by in corpus (18)

• Precision tomography of a three-qubit donor quantum processor in silicon
• Noise-correlation spectrum for a pair of spin qubits in silicon
• Vibrations on pulse tube based Dry Dilution Refrigerators for low noise measurements
• Schrödinger cat states of a nuclear spin qudit in silicon
• Progress in cooling nanoelectronic devices to ultra-low temperatures
• Controllable freezing of the nuclear spin bath in a single-atom spin qubit
• Piezospectroscopic measurement of high-frequency vibrations in a pulse-tube cryostat
• An ultra-stable 1.5 tesla permanent magnet assembly for qubit experiments at cryogenic temperatures
• Single spin qubit geometric gate in a silicon quantum dot
• Reducing current noise in cryogenic experiments by vacuum-insulated cables
• Cryogenic broadband vibration measurement on a cryogen-free dilution refrigerator
• Dispersive readout of reconfigurable ambipolar quantum dots in a silicon-on-insulator nanowire
• Scalable entanglement of nuclear spins mediated by electron exchange
• Method for efficient large-scale cryogenic characterization of CMOS technologies
• Helium surface fluctuations investigated with superconducting coplanar waveguide resonator
• Thermal coupling of silicon oscillators in cryogen-free dilution refrigerators
• Isolation solution for extreme environmental vibrations for quantum-enabling cryogenic setups installed on raised frames
• Soft-clamped silicon nitride string resonators at millikelvin temperatures