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Shushen Qin

Publications and source records attributed to Shushen Qin.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

Single-tone drive-enhanced CROT gate for bosonic quantum error correction

Bosonic error correction provides a hardware-efficient route to protected qubits for accurate quantum information processing. A critical component for error correction of rotation-symmetric bosonic (RSB) codes, like the well-known cat codes, is the two-mode controlled-rotation (CROT) operation. The CROT gate is useful because of its code-agnostic generality and its error-propagation properties. While the CROT gate can in principle be composed from existing bosonic physical primitives, the desirable properties are typically lost when composed as a sequence of imperfect primitive operations. Past work has focused on direct implementations that rely on features of specific codes. Here, we present a direct route to CROT within the circuit-QED architecture that retains its code-agnostic and error-propagation characteristics. By driving a transmon simultaneously coupled to two microwave cavities, we controllably enhance the effective nonlinearities between the microwave cavities and thus engineer the necessary two-mode interaction underlying the CROT gate. Using only a single drive frequency, we can achieve an on-off ratio sufficient for gate implementation, while minimizing mode distortions. We provide simple analytical formulas that permit the identification of potential working regimes, further refined by exact numerics, and illustrate the efficacy of our CROT approach in an error-correction example involving different RSB codes within the same circuit. Our CROT gate adds to the arsenal of direct two-mode gates available for general bosonic information processing.

quant-ph

A direct controlled-phase gate between microwave photons

The rich dynamics and large Hilbert space of quantum harmonic oscillators make them natural candidates for hardware-efficient and error-correctable quantum information processing. However, implementing direct entangling operations between oscillators remains an outstanding challenge. Existing strategies typically rely on parametrically activating interactions that populate the excited states of a nonlinear element, which introduces additional dissipation channels and potential leakage from the encoded manifold. Here, we engineer a Raman-assisted cross-Kerr interaction between microwave photons hosted in two superconducting cavities. Crucially, this dynamics does not excite the mediating nonlinear coupler, thereby suppressing coupler induced decoherence and leakage out of the bosonic code space. We use this direct nonlinear coupling to implement a controlled-phase gate within the single- and two-photon subspaces of two oscillators, deterministically generating entanglement between them. Finally, we use these engineered dynamics to implement a photon-number parity check on a storage cavity via purely bosonic interactions with an ancillary cavity, demonstrating an enhancement in the storage lifetime. Our work provides a promising pathway toward engineering robust operations that act entirely within a protected bosonic code space and realizing fault-tolerant quantum information processing with bosonic elements.

quant-ph

Circuit-level fault tolerance of cat codes

Bosonic codes encode quantum information into a single infinite-dimensional physical system endowed with error correction capabilities. This reduces the need for complex management of many physical constituents compared with standard approaches employing multiple physical qubits. Recent discussions of bosonic codes centre around correcting only boson-loss errors, with phase errors either actively suppressed or deferred to subsequent layers of encoding with standard qubit codes. Rotationally symmetric bosonic (RSB) codes, which include the well-known cat and binomial codes, are capable of simultaneous correction of loss and phase errors, offering an alternate route that deals with arbitrary errors already at the base layer. Here, we investigate the robustness of such codes, moving away from the more idealistic past studies towards a circuit-level noise analysis closer to the practical situation where every physical component in the device is potentially faulty. We extend the concept of fault tolerance to the case of RSB codes, and then examine the performance of two known error correction circuits under circuit-level noise. Our analysis reveals a significantly more stringent noise threshold for fault-tolerant operation than found in past works; nevertheless, we show how, through waiting-time optimization and the use of squeezing, we can restore the noise requirements to a regime achievable with near-term quantum hardware. While our focus here is on cat codes for concreteness, a similar analysis applies for general RSB codes.

quant-ph

Optimal control for Hamiltonian parameter estimation in non-commuting and bipartite quantum dynamics

The ability to characterise a Hamiltonian with high precision is crucial for the implementation of quantum technologies. In addition to the well-developed approaches utilising optimal probe states and optimal measurements, the method of optimal control can be used to identify time-dependent pulses applied to the system to achieve higher precision in the estimation of Hamiltonian parameters, especially in the presence of noise. Here, we extend optimally controlled estimation schemes for single qubits to non-commuting dynamics as well as two interacting qubits, demonstrating improvements in terms of maximal precision, time-stability, as well as robustness over uncontrolled protocols.

quant-ph