High-impedance Superconducting Circuits Enabling Fault-tolerant Quantum Computing by Wideband Microwave Control

A physical system implementing a quantum bit (qubit) is never perfectly isolated from an uncontrolled environment. The system dynamics is thus noisy, modifying randomly the qubit state. This phenomenon of decoherence is the main roadblock to build a stable quantum computing platform.

In order to mitigate decoherence, quantum error correction employs only a few code states within a much larger informational space, so that noise-induced dynamics can be detected and corrected before the encoded information gets corrupted.

Unfortunately, most known protocols require to control dauntingly complex systems, with a degree of coherence currently out of reach. Our project is to build autonomously error-corrected qubits encoded in high-impedance superconducting circuits.

In our protocol, a qubit is encoded in the vast phase-space of the quantum oscillator implemented by each circuit, in the form of Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) states.

The novelty is that the GKP states are fully stabilized by a modular dissipation, induced by the coherent tunneling of charges through a stroboscopically biased Josephson junction.

The coherence of the encoded qubit is expected to exceed that of existing superconducting qubits by orders of magnitude.

Furthermore, we propose to perform protected logical gates between encoded qubits by varying adiabatically the parameters of the modular dissipation, paving the way toward fault-tolerant quantum computing.

The major experimental challenge of our protocol resides in the exquisite level of control needed over a wide band in the microwave range.

We propose to address this challenge by developing novel on-chip filters, tunable couplers and isolators based on periodically modulated, high-impedance, transmission lines.

These on-chip components would find a wide range of applications in quantum technologies, and favor the advent of large-scale quantum computing platforms.