Disentangling the sources of ionizing radiation in superconducting qubits

Abstract

Radioactivity was recently discovered as a source of decoherence and correlated errors for the real-world implementation of superconducting quantum processors. In this work, we measure levels of radioactivity present in a typical laboratory environment (from muons, neutrons, and gamma's emitted by naturally occurring radioactive isotopes) and in the most commonly used materials for the assembly and operation of state-of-the-art superconducting qubits. We develop a GEANT-4 based simulation to predict the rate of impacts and the amount of energy released in a qubit chip from each of the mentioned sources. We finally propose mitigation strategies for the operation of next-generation qubits in a radio-pure environment.

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Resisting high-energy impact events through gap engineering in superconducting qubit arrays
• Hierarchical memories: Simulating quantum LDPC codes with local gates
• Abatement of Ionizing Radiation for Superconducting Quantum Devices
• Cosmic muon flux attenuation methods for superconducting qubit experiments
• CUTE: A Cryogenic Underground TEst Facility at SNOLAB
• Fight or Flight: Cosmic Ray-Induced Phonons and the Quantum Surface Code
• Mitigating cosmic ray-like correlated events with a modular quantum processor
• Averting multi-qubit burst errors in surface code magic state factories
• Charge Parity Rates in Transmon Qubits with Different Shunting Capacitors
• First Measurement of Correlated Charge Noise in Superconducting Qubits at an Underground Facility
• Conceptual study of a two-layer silicon pixel detector to tag the passage of muons from cosmic sources through quantum processors