arXiv subjects

Alexandre Blais

Publications and source records attributed to Alexandre Blais.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Observation of coherent flux-charge interaction in a gate-tunable fluxonium

Interactions that mix conjugate variables, such as the flux through a circuit element and the charge across it, lie outside the reach of the elementary couplings of superconducting circuits. Capacitors connect charge to charge, and inductors connect flux to flux, while no two-terminal element couples flux to charge directly. A native flux-charge coupling would thus serve as a circuit primitive in its own right, opening direct routes to non-reciprocity, protected modes, and unconventional readout. In this work, we demonstrate a flux-charge coupling by harnessing a voltage-tunable Josephson junction with parametrically modulated critical current, which mediates the interaction between a classical charge variable and a quantum flux operator. Relying on parity-selection rules in a hybrid superconducting-semiconductor fluxonium, we isolate the flux-charge coupling from other parasitic capacitive contributions and perform cross-quadrature-activated coherent control of states. Critically, we realize a flux-charge coupling that scales linearly with driving amplitude while keeping the transition energy first-order-insensitive to gate voltage. Such unconventional interaction broadens the toolbox of superconducting circuits with a critical missing component that enables the coherent coupling of conjugate variables.

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arXiv2026

Measurement-induced state transitions in multi-qubit transmon processors

Dispersive readout of the transmon qubit in circuit QED is known to lose its quantum non-demolition character at small to moderate measurement drive amplitudes. This phenomenon is understood to originate from Laundau-Zener transitions at accidental multi-photon resonances, where $n$ drive photons can promote the transmon by $m$ levels. This interpretation has been shown to be in agreement with experiments characterizing the dispersive readout of a single transmon. The impact of these measurement-induced state transition (MIST) of a transmon embedded in a multi-qubit chip, however, remains largely unexplored. Here, we show that the presence of other components, such as qubits and couplers, can affect the MIST threshold of a measured transmon. To arrive at these results, we present a general method to characterize measurement-induced transition when the qubit under readout is coupled to other circuit elements, a ubiquitous situation in circuit QED-based quantum processors. As an example, we consider the case of two transmon qubits, and we show that the spectator qubit can be impacted by the measurement-induced transition of the readout qubit and, conversely, that the presence of the spectator qubit can lower the MIST threshold of the readout qubit. Finally, we explore how adding a coupler mode between the two qubits further modifies these effects.

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arXiv2026

Measurement-induced state transitions across the fluxonium qubit landscape

Understanding the mechanisms that limit high-fidelity readout in circuit quantum electrodynamics is essential for its optimization. Multi-photon resonances are understood to be a limiting factor, causing population transfer from the computational states to higher-energy states under drive. This effect, known as measurement-induced state transitions, has been extensively studied for the transmon qubit. While this exploration has begun for the fluxonium qubit, a systematic study of this effect is lacking. Here, we bridge this gap by theoretically studying measurement-induced state transitions in the fluxonium qubit over a wide range of parameters, comprising essentially all experimentally explored ranges. We find that lighter fluxoniums are less susceptible to these state transitions when compared to their heavier counterparts. We attribute this effect to the combination of lower density of multi-photon resonances, a smaller requisite coupling for a given dispersive shift, and a more harmonic-like structure of the charge operator. We confirm the validity of our analysis by performing time-dependent readout simulations. Finally, we consider the impact of the superinductor's array modes on measurement-induced state transitions over a large range of parameters.

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arXiv2026

Absence of Charge Offset Drift in a Transmon Qubit

Superconducting quantum circuits are sensitive to their electrostatic environment: uncontrolled charges accumulating on the electrodes of a Josephson junction shift the energy levels of a qubit, perturbing its operation and restricting their design. This effect is captured by a single parameter - the charge offset - whose slow, unpredictable drift has proven difficult to eliminate in practice. Here, we report a tantalum-based transmon qubit in which the charge offset remains pinned at zero over nearly three months of measurements, including two thermal cycles, with no observable compromise to the qubit lifetime. This exceptional stability disappears in later cooldowns, indicating a fragile mechanism at play. We attribute it to the inductance of a thin superconducting layer inadvertently formed in parallel with the Josephson junction during fabrication. X-ray surface spectroscopy suggests this layer arises from an incomplete wet-etch of tantalum on sapphire. Deliberately engineering such a layer offers a route to eliminating charge-offset drift in superconducting circuits more broadly.

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arXiv2026

Fast, high-fidelity Transmon readout with intrinsic Purcell protection via nonperturbative cross-Kerr coupling

Dispersive readout of superconducting qubits relies on a transverse capacitive coupling that hybridizes the qubit with the readout resonator, subjecting the qubit to Purcell decay and measurement-induced state transitions (MIST). Despite the widespread use of Purcell filters to suppress qubit decay and near-quantum-limited amplifiers, dispersive readout often lags behind single- and two-qubit gates in both speed and fidelity. Here, we experimentally demonstrate junction readout, a simple readout architecture that realizes a strong qubit-resonator cross-Kerr interaction without relying on a transverse coupling. This interaction is achieved by coupling a transmon qubit to its readout resonator through both a capacitance and a Josephson junction. By varying the qubit frequency, we show that this hybrid coupling provides intrinsic Purcell protection and enhanced resilience to MIST, enabling readout at high photon numbers. While junction readout is compatible with conventional linear measurement, in this work we exploit the nonlinear coupling to intentionally engineer a large Kerr nonlinearity in the resonator, enabling bifurcation-based readout. Using this approach, we achieve a 99.4 % assignment fidelity with a 68 ns integration time and a 98.4 % QND fidelity without an external Purcell filter or a near-quantum-limited amplifier. These results establish the junction readout architecture with bifurcation-based readout as a scalable and practical alternative to dispersive readout, enabling fast, high-fidelity qubit measurement with reduced hardware overhead.

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arXiv2025

Enabling Technologies for Scalable Superconducting Quantum Computing

Experiments with superconducting quantum processors have successfully demonstrated the basic functions needed for quantum computation and evidence of utility, albeit without a sizable array of error-corrected qubits. The realization of the full potential of quantum computing centers on achieving large scale fault-tolerant quantum computers. Science, engineering and industry advances are needed to robustly generate, sustain, and efficiently manipulate an exponentially large computational (Hilbert) space as well as supply the number and quality components needed for such a scaled system. In this article, we suggest critical areas of quantum system and ecosystem development, with respect to the handling and transmission of quantum information within and out of a cryogenic environment, that would accelerate the development of quantum computers based on superconducting circuits.

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arXiv2025

How the Kerr-Cat Qubit Dies -- And How to Rescue It

Kerr-cat qubits have been experimentally shown to exhibit a large noise bias, with one decay channel suppressed by several orders of magnitude. In superconducting implementations, increasing the microwave drive on the nonlinear oscillator that hosts the Kerr-cat qubit should, in principle, further enhance this bias. Instead, experiments reveal that above a critical drive amplitude the tunneling time, which is the less dominant decay channel, ceases to increase and even decreases. Here, we show that this breakdown arises from the multimode nature of the circuit implementation. Specifically, additional modes, including the buffer mode used to deliver the stabilizing drive and higher modes of the Josephson junction array, can induce multiphoton resonances that sharply degrade Kerr-cat coherence. We uncover this mechanism by retaining the full circuit nonlinearities and treating the strong drive exactly within a Floquet-Markov framework that accounts for quasidegeneracies of the Kerr-cat spectrum. Our results not only provide an explanation for the sudden reduction of the tunneling time but also demonstrate that the Kerr-cat qubit can be very robust in the presence of a carefully engineered electromagnetic environment. Beyond the Kerr-cat qubit, the tools developed here apply broadly to strongly driven dissipative systems with quasidegenerate spectra, including superconducting devices under subharmonic driving (e.g., parametric amplifiers and couplers) and protected qubits where quasidegeneracies similarly govern coherence.

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arXiv2025

Quantum sensing of displacements with stabilized GKP states

We demonstrate how recent protocols developed for the stabilization of Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) states can be used for the estimation of two-quadrature displacement sensing, with sensitivities approaching the multivariate quantum Cramer-Rao bound. Thanks to the stabilization, this sensor is backaction evading and can function continuously without reset, making it well suited for the detection of itinerant signals. Additionally, we provide numerical simulations showing that the protocol can unconditionally surpass the Gaussian limit of displacement sensing with prior information, even in the presence of realistic noise. Our work shows how reservoir engineering in bosonic systems can be leveraged for quantum metrology, with potential applications in force sensing, waveform estimation and quantum channel learning.

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arXiv2025

Exceeding the Parametric Drive Strength Threshold in Nonlinear Circuits

Superconducting quantum circuits rely on strong drives to implement fast gates, high-fidelity readout, and state stabilization. However, these drives can induce uncontrolled excitations, so-called "ionization", that compromise the fidelity of these operations. While now well-characterized in the context of qubit readout, it remains unclear how general this limitation is across the more general setting of parametric control. Here, we demonstrate that a nonlinear coupler, exemplified by a transmon, undergoes ionization under strong parametric driving, leading to a breakdown of coherent control and thereby limiting the accessible gate speeds. Through experiments and numerical simulations, we associate this behavior with the emergence of drive-induced chaotic dynamics, which we characterize quantitatively using the instantaneous Floquet spectrum. Our results reveal that the Floquet spectrum provides a unifying framework for understanding strong-drive limitations across a wide range of operations on superconducting quantum circuits. This insight establishes fundamental constraints on parametric control and offers design principles for mitigating drive-induced decoherence in next-generation quantum processors.

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arXiv2025

Probing excited-state dynamics of transmon ionization

The fidelity and quantum nondemolition character of the dispersive readout in circuit QED are limited by unwanted transitions to highly excited states at specific photon numbers in the readout resonator. This observation can be explained by multiphoton resonances between computational states and highly excited states in strongly driven nonlinear systems, analogous to multiphoton ionization in atoms and molecules. In this work, we utilize the multilevel nature of high-$E_J/E_C$ transmons to probe the excited-state dynamics induced by strong drives during readout. With up to 10 resolvable states, we quantify the critical photon number of ionization, the resulting state after ionization, and the fraction of the population transferred to highly excited states. Moreover, using pulse-shaping to control the photon number in the readout resonator in the high-power regime, we tune the adiabaticity of the transition and verify that transmon ionization is a Landau-Zener-type transition. We further extend these methods to a typical transmon with $E_J/E_C \approx 55$ and probe the offset-charge dependence of ionization dynamics in a timed-resolved manner. Our experimental results agree well with the theoretical prediction from a semiclassical driven transmon model and may guide future exploration of strongly driven nonlinear oscillators.

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arXiv2025

Offset Charge Dependence of Measurement-Induced Transitions in Transmons

A key challenge in achieving scalable fault tolerance in superconducting quantum processors is readout fidelity, which lags behind one- and two-qubit gate fidelity. A major limitation in improving qubit readout is measurement-induced transitions, also referred to as qubit ionization, caused by multiphoton qubit-resonator excitation occurring at specific photon numbers. Since ionization can involve highly excited states, it has been predicted that in transmons -- the most widely used superconducting qubit -- the photon number at which measurement-induced transitions occur is gate charge dependent. This dependence is expected to persist deep in the transmon regime where the qubit frequency is gate charge insensitive. We experimentally confirm this prediction by characterizing measurement-induced transitions with increasing resonator photon population while actively stabilizing the transmon's gate charge. Furthermore, because highly excited states are involved, achieving quantitative agreement between theory and experiment requires accounting for higher-order harmonics in the transmon Hamiltonian.

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arXiv2025

Experimentally Informed Decoding of Stabilizer Codes Based on Syndrome Correlations

High-fidelity decoding of quantum error correction codes relies on an accurate experimental model of the physical errors occurring in the device. Because error probabilities can depend on the context of the applied operations, the error model is ideally calibrated using the same circuit as is used for the error correction experiment. Here, we present an experimental approach guided by a novel analytical formula to characterize the probability of independent errors using correlations in the syndrome data generated by executing the error correction circuit. Using the method on a distance-three surface code, we analyze error channels that flip an arbitrary number of syndrome elements, including Pauli Y errors, hook errors, multi-qubit errors, and leakage, in addition to standard Pauli X and Z errors. We use the method to find the optimal weights for a minimum-weight perfect matching decoder without relying on a theoretical error model. Additionally, we investigate whether improved knowledge of the Pauli Y error channel, based on correlating the X- and Z-type error syndromes, can be exploited to enhance matching decoding. Furthermore, we find correlated errors that flip many syndrome elements over up-to-eight cycles, potentially caused by leakage of the data qubits out of the computational subspace. The presented method provides the tools for accurately calibrating a broad family of decoders, beyond the minimum-weight perfect matching decoder, without relying on prior knowledge of the error model.

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arXiv2025

Balanced cross-Kerr coupling for superconducting qubit readout

Dispersive readout, the standard method for measuring superconducting qubits, is limited by multiphoton qubit-resonator processes arising even at moderate drive powers. These processes degrade performance, causing dispersive readout to lag behind single- and two-qubit gates in both speed and fidelity. In this work, we propose a novel readout method, termed "junction readout". Junction readout leverages the nonperturbative cross-Kerr interaction resulting from coupling a qubit and a resonator via a Josephson junction. Furthermore, by adding a capacitive coupling in parallel to the junction, Purcell decay can be suppressed without the need for a Purcell filter. We also show that junction readout is more robust against deleterious multiphoton processes, and offers greater flexibility for resonator frequency allocation. Crucially, junction readout achieves superior performance compared to dispersive readout while maintaining similar hardware overhead. Numerical simulations show that junction readout can achieve fidelities exceeding $99.99\%$ in under $30$ ns, making it a promising alternative for superconducting qubit readout with current hardware.

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arXiv2024

Robustness of longitudinal transmon readout to ionization

Multi-photon processes deteriorate the quantum non-demolition (QND) character of the dispersive readout in circuit QED, causing readout to lag behind single and two-qubit gates, in both speed and fidelity. Alternative methods such as the longitudinal readout have been proposed, however, it is unknown to what extent multi-photon processes hinder this approach. Here we investigate the QND character of the longitudinal readout of the transmon qubit. We show that the deleterious effects that arise due to multi-photon transitions can be heavily suppressed with detuning, owing to the fact that the longitudinal interaction strength is independent of the transmon-resonator detuning. We consider the effect of circuit disorder, the selection rules that act on the transmon, as well as the description of longitudinal readout in the classical limit of the transmon to show qualitatively that longitudinal readout is robust. We show that fast, high-fidelity QND readout of transmon qubits is possible with longitudinal coupling.

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arXiv2024

High-fidelity gates in a transmon using bath engineering for passive leakage reset

Leakage, the occupation of any state not used in the computation, is one of the of the most devastating errors in quantum error correction. Transmons, the most common superconducting qubits, are weakly anharmonic multilevel systems, and are thus prone to this type of error. Here we demonstrate a device which reduces the lifetimes of the leakage states in the transmon by three orders of magnitude, while protecting the qubit lifetime and the single-qubit gate fidelties. To do this we attach a qubit through an on-chip seventh-order Chebyshev filter to a cold resistor. The filter is engineered such that the leakage transitions are in its passband, while the qubit transition is in its stopband. Dissipation through the filter reduces the lifetime of the transmon's $f$ state, the lowest energy leakage state, by three orders of magnitude to 33 ns, while simultaneously keeping the qubit lifetime to greater than 100 $\mu$s. Even though the $f$ state is transiently populated during a single qubit gate, no negative effect of the filter is detected with errors per gate approaching 1e-4. Modelling the filter as coupled linear harmonic oscillators, our theoretical analysis of the device corroborate our experimental findings. This leakage reduction unit turns leakage errors into errors within the qubit subspace that are correctable with traditional quantum error correction. We demonstrate the operation of the filter as leakage reduction unit in a mock-up of a single-qubit quantum error correcting cycle, showing that the filter increases the seepage rate back to the qubit subspace.

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arXiv2024

Quantum optimal control of superconducting qubits based on machine-learning characterization

Implementing fast and high-fidelity quantum operations using open-loop quantum optimal control relies on having an accurate model of the quantum dynamics. Any deviations between this model and the complete dynamics of the device, such as the presence of spurious modes or pulse distortions, can degrade the performance of optimal controls in practice. Here, we propose an experimentally simple approach to realize optimal quantum controls tailored to the device parameters and environment while specifically characterizing this quantum system. Concretely, we use physics-inspired machine learning to infer an accurate model of the dynamics from experimentally available data and then optimize our experimental controls on this trained model. We show the power and feasibility of this approach by optimizing arbitrary single-qubit operations on a superconducting transmon qubit, using detailed numerical simulations. We demonstrate that this framework produces an accurate description of the device dynamics under arbitrary controls, together with the precise pulses achieving arbitrary single-qubit gates with a high fidelity of about 99.99%.

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arXiv2024

Deterministic generation of a 20-qubit two-dimensional photonic cluster state

Multidimensional cluster states are a key resource for robust quantum communication, measurement-based quantum computing and quantum metrology. Here, we present a device capable of emitting large-scale entangled microwave photonic states in a two dimensional ladder structure. The device consists of a pair of coupled superconducting transmon qubits which are each tuneably coupled to a common output waveguide. This architecture permits entanglement between each transmon and a deterministically emitted photonic qubit. By interleaving two-qubit gates with controlled photon emission, we generate 2 x n grids of time- and frequency-multiplexed cluster states of itinerant microwave photons. We measure a signature of localizable entanglement across up to 20 photonic qubits. We expect the device architecture to be capable of generating a wide range of other tensor network states such as tree graph states, repeater states or the ground state of the toric code, and to be readily scalable to generate larger and higher dimensional states.

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arXiv2024

Optimal control in large open quantum systems: the case of transmon readout and reset

We present a framework that combines the adjoint-state method together with reverse-time backpropagation to solve prohibitively large open-system quantum control problems. Our approach enables the optimization of arbitrary cost functions with fully general controls applied on large open quantum systems described by a Lindblad master equation. It is scalable, computationally efficient, and has a low-memory footprint. We apply this framework to optimize two inherently dissipative operations in superconducting qubits which lag behind in terms of fidelity and duration compared to other unitary operations: the dispersive readout and all-microwave reset of a transmon qubit. Our results show that while standard pulses for dispersive readout are nearly optimal, adding a transmon drive during the protocol can yield 2x improvements in fidelity and duration. We further demonstrate a 2x improvement in reset fidelity and duration through pulse shaping, indicating significant potential for enhancement in reset protocols. Our approach can readily be applied to optimize quantum controls in a vast range of applications such as reservoir engineering, autonomous quantum error correction, and leakage-reduction units.

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