Modeling phonon-mediated quasiparticle poisoning in superconducting qubit arrays

Abstract

Correlated errors caused by ionizing radiation impacting superconducting qubit chips are problematic for quantum error correction. Such impacts generate quasiparticle (QP) excitations in the qubit electrodes, which temporarily reduce qubit coherence significantly. The many energetic phonons produced by a particle impact travel efficiently throughout the device substrate and generate quasiparticles with high probability, thus causing errors on a large fraction of the qubits in an array simultaneously. We describe a comprehensive strategy for the numerical simulation of the phonon and quasiparticle dynamics in the aftermath of an impact. We compare the simulations with experimental measurements of phonon-mediated QP poisoning and demonstrate that our modeling captures the spatial and temporal footprint of the QP poisoning for various configurations of phonon downconversion structures. We thus present a path forward for the operation of superconducting quantum processors in the presence of ionizing radiation.

18 pages, 15 figures, 2 tables

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• Quasiparticle dynamics in a superconducting qubit irradiated by a localized infrared source
• The Superconducting Quasiparticle-Amplifying Transmon: A Qubit-Based Sensor for meV Scale Phonons and Single THz Photons
• Low-Energy Backgrounds in Solid-State Phonon and Charge Detectors
• Estimating the Energy Threshold of Phonon-mediated Superconducting Qubit Detectors Operated in an Energy-Relaxation Sensing Scheme
• Nonequilibrium regimes for quasiparticles in superconducting qubits with gap-asymmetric junctions
• On the Efficacy of Surface Codes in Compensating for Radiation Events in Superconducting Devices
• Quantum error mitigation in optimized circuits for particle-density correlations in real-time dynamics of the Schwinger model
• Low crosstalk modular flip-chip architecture for coupled superconducting qubits
• Cosmogenic Muon Background Characterization for the Colorado Underground Research Institute (CURIE)
• Quasiparticle-induced decoherence of a driven superconducting qubit