Phonon downconversion to suppress correlated errors in superconducting qubits

Abstract

Quantum error correction can preserve quantum information in the presence of local errors, but correlated errors are fatal. For superconducting qubits, high-energy particle impacts from background radioactivity produce energetic phonons that travel throughout the substrate and create excitations above the superconducting ground state, known as quasiparticles, which can poison all qubits on the chip. We use normal metal reservoirs on the chip back side to downconvert phonons to low energies where they can no longer poison qubits. We introduce a pump-probe scheme involving controlled injection of pair-breaking phonons into the qubit chips. We examine quasiparticle poisoning on chips with and without back-side metallization and demonstrate a reduction in the flux of pair-breaking phonons by over a factor of 20. We use a Ramsey interferometer scheme to simultaneously monitor quasiparticle parity on three qubits for each chip and observe a two-order of magnitude reduction in correlated poisoning due to background radiation.

24 pages, 17 figures, 5 tables

References in corpus (5)

• Surface codes: Towards practical large-scale quantum computation
• Measurement and Control of Quasiparticle Dynamics in a Superconducting Qubit
• Quasiparticle relaxation of superconducting qubits in the presence of flux
• Mitigation of Cosmic Ray Effect on Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detector Arrays
• A Stress Induced Source of Phonon Bursts and Quasiparticle Poisoning

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• Low-Energy Backgrounds in Solid-State Phonon and Charge Detectors
• Thermometry Based on a Superconducting Qubit
• Quasiparticle effects in magnetic-field-resilient 3D transmons
• Estimating the Energy Threshold of Phonon-mediated Superconducting Qubit Detectors Operated in an Energy-Relaxation Sensing Scheme
• Cosmic muon flux attenuation methods for superconducting qubit experiments
• Quasiparticle Dynamics in Superconducting Quantum-Classical Hybrid Circuits
• Identification and Mitigation of Conducting Package Losses for Quantum Superconducting Devices
• Modeling Athermal Phonons in Novel Materials using the G4CMP Simulation Toolkit
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• Charge Parity Rates in Transmon Qubits with Different Shunting Capacitors
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