arXiv subjects

Srivatsan Chakram

Publications and source records attributed to Srivatsan Chakram.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Universal Jaynes-Cummings Control of an Oscillator

The Jaynes-Cummings (JC) interaction-the coherent exchange of excitations between a two-level system and a harmonic oscillator-is one of the fundamental interactions of quantum optics, realized across platforms such as cavity quantum electrodynamics, trapped ions, mechanical resonators, and superconducting circuits. Although JC interactions and qubit rotations form a universal gate set for oscillator control, practical implementations have not been demonstrated. Here we develop and experimentally demonstrate universal JC-based oscillator control by compiling arbitrary unitary gates into sequences of JC interactions and qubit rotations. In our experiment, the oscillator is realized using a mode of a high quality factor microwave cavity and the ancilla qubit using a superconducting transmon circuit, with the JC interaction implemented by a sideband interaction enabled by the Josephson nonlinearity. The native gates are constructed to be closed below a chosen cutoff photon number, encoding a qudit with suppressed leakage errors, while ancilla relaxation errors are detectable. We further find that the dispersive shift serves as a compilation resource that reduces circuit depths. We demonstrate universal qudit control and implement a single-qutrit gate set with a mean post-selected process fidelity of 96.3%, as well as ququart and ququint shift gates. These results establish Jaynes-Cummings control as a practical route to universal oscillator control, enabling programmable bosonic processors across a variety of quantum platforms.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Architectural scaling tradeoffs in modular 3D bosonic quantum processors

We propose a modular three-dimensional bosonic quantum processor built from repeatable coupled-cavity modules linked by configurable interconnect networks. Using hardware-motivated graph-theoretic measures, we compare nearest-neighbor, hub-based, and hybrid architectures in terms of interconnect count, communication distance, resource concentration, and implementation complexity. Rather than identifying a universally optimal topology, our analysis shows how these architectures redistribute the costs of scaling, including wiring and port requirements, nonlocal communication distance, exposure to shared resources, routing bottlenecks, and scheduling overhead. Case studies of a $3\times3$ processor and a larger hierarchical architecture further distinguish finite-size performance from asymptotic scaling. The resulting framework provides a systematic basis for evaluating modular three-dimensional bosonic processors and for identifying the device-level parameters required for quantitative hardware design.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Ultracoherent superconducting cavity-based multiqudit platform with error-resilient control

Realizing the promise of quantum computing requires simultaneously increasing Hilbert-space size and coherence times. While qubit-based architectures have long been the dominant paradigm, large local Hilbert spaces enable qudits, which offer more compact circuits and natural representations for quantum simulation in chemistry, condensed matter, and high-energy physics. Superconducting radio-frequency (SRF) cavities are attractive building blocks for qudit-based quantum technologies because of their exceptionally low dissipation and large bosonic Hilbert spaces, but turning them into programmable modules requires extra effort because the nonlinear circuitry required for control and measurement often introduces loss and noise that erode the memory advantage. Here we demonstrate a two-mode SRF cavity module weakly coupled to an ancillary transmon circuit and engineered to suppress controller-induced dissipation and dephasing, achieving single-photon lifetimes of 20.6 ms and 15.6 ms and a dephasing time exceeding 40 ms. Using sideband interactions together with error-resilient protocols incorporating measurement-based correction and post-selection, we prepare Fock states up to $N=20$ with fidelities exceeding 95% and generate two-mode entanglement near the coherence limit, approaching 99.9%. By combining ultracoherent storage with high-fidelity control, this work moves cavity-based hardware beyond memory-only operation and establishes a practical route toward high-dimensional encodings and scalable modular quantum information processing.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Universal monitored dynamics in multimode bosonic systems

We propose a route to study monitored many-body dynamics in multimode bosonic systems using circuit quantum electrodynamics. In this experimental setting, we construct several bosonic models comprising brickwork circuits built from beam-splitter gates, local parity measurements, and optional on-site Hubbard interactions, and diagnose their monitored dynamics via ancilla purification and a learnability-based probe. Under parity measurements, generic gate sets exhibit behavior that is largely consistent with a conventional measurement-induced phase transition, while a special class of beam-splitter circuits shows an apparent critical-like high-measurement regime in which purification times scale linearly with system size. We show that for realistic noise, gate, and measurement rates, these signatures are observable with near-term circuit QED hardware.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

A Cascaded Random Access Quantum Memory

Dynamic random access memory (DRAM) is critical to classical computing but notably absent in current superconducting quantum processors. Integrating high-coherence memory units would enable resource-efficient control of logical qubits and allow the separate optimization of logic and storage subsystems. Here, we realize an 8-bit cascaded random access quantum memory (RAQM). By introducing a buffer layer between the processor and a multimode storage cavity, we leverage the control resources of a single transmon to address eight memory modes while isolating them from processor non-linearities. We demonstrate arbitrary random access with an average infidelity of $\lesssim 1.5\%$ per mode, characterizing the many-body interactions that dominate the error budget. This architecture enables a significant reduction in control lines per logical qubit and supports transversal operations within the memory module, establishing a scalable unit cell for fault-tolerant quantum architectures.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Floquet-engineered fast SNAP gates in weakly coupled circuit-QED systems

Superconducting cavities with high quality factors, coupled to a fixed-frequency transmon, provide a state-of-the-art platform for quantum information storage and manipulation. The commonly used selective number-dependent arbitrary phase (SNAP) gate faces significant challenges in ultra-high-coherence cavities, where the weak dispersive shifts necessary for preserving high coherence typically result in prolonged gate times. Here, we propose a protocol to achieve high-fidelity SNAP gates that are orders of magnitude faster than the standard implementation, surpassing the speed limit set by the bare dispersive shift. We achieve this enhancement by dynamically amplifying the dispersive coupling via sideband interactions, followed by quantum optimal control on the Floquet-engineered system. We also present a unified perturbation theory that explains both the gate acceleration and the associated benign drive-induced decoherence, corroborated by Floquet-Markov simulations. These results pave the way for the experimental realization of high-fidelity, selective control of weakly coupled, high-coherence cavities, and expanding the scope of optimal control techniques to a broader class of Floquet quantum systems.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Niobium coaxial cavities with internal quality factors exceeding 1.5 billion for circuit quantum electrodynamics

Group-V materials such as niobium and tantalum have become popular choices for extending the performance of circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) platforms allowing for quantum processors and memories with reduced error rates and more modes. The complex surface chemistry of niobium however makes identifying the main modes of decoherence difficult at millikelvin temperatures and single-photon powers. We use niobium coaxial quarter-wave cavities to study the impact of etch chemistry, prolonged atmospheric exposure, and the significance of cavity conditions prior to and during cooldown, in particular niobium hydride evolution, on single-photon coherence. We demonstrate cavities with quality factors of Q_int>1.4X10^9 in the single-photon regime, a 15 fold improvement over aluminum cavities of the same geometry. We rigorously quantify the sensitivity of our fabrication process to various loss mechanisms and demonstrate a 2-4X reduction in the two-level system (TLS) loss tangent and a 3-5X improvement in the residual resistance over traditional BCP etching techniques. Finally, we demonstrate transmon integration and coherent cavity control while maintaining a cavity coherence of 11.3ms. The accessibility of our method, which can easily be replicated in academic-lab settings, and the demonstration of its performance mark an advancement in 3D cQED.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Fast Sideband Control of a Weakly Coupled Multimode Bosonic Memory

Circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) with superconducting cavities coupled to nonlinear circuits like transmons offers a promising platform for hardware-efficient quantum information processing. We address critical challenges in realizing this architecture by weakening the dispersive coupling while also demonstrating fast, high-fidelity multimode control by dynamically amplifying gate speeds through transmon-mediated sideband interactions. This approach enables transmon-cavity SWAP gates, for which we achieve speeds up to 30 times larger than the bare dispersive coupling. Combined with transmon rotations, this allows for efficient, universal state preparation in a single cavity mode, though achieving unitary gates and extending control to multiple modes remains a challenge. In this work, we overcome this by introducing two sideband control strategies: (1) a shelving technique that prevents unwanted transitions by temporarily storing populations in sideband-transparent transmon states and (2) a method that exploits the dispersive shift to synchronize sideband transition rates across chosen photon-number pairs to implement transmon-cavity SWAP gates that are selective on photon number. We leverage these protocols to prepare Fock and binomial code states across any of ten modes of a multimode cavity with millisecond cavity coherence times. We demonstrate the encoding of a qubit from a transmon into arbitrary vacuum and Fock state superpositions, as well as entangled NOON states of cavity mode pairs\textemdash a scheme extendable to arbitrary multimode Fock encodings. Furthermore, we implement a new binomial encoding gate that converts arbitrary transmon superpositions into binomial code states in $\qty{4}{\micro\second}$ (less than $1/χ$), achieving an average post-selected final state fidelity of $\qty{96.3}{\percent}$ across different fiducial input states.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Efficient quantum tomography of a polynomial subspace

Quantum tomography is crucial for characterizing the quantum states of multipartite systems, but its practicality is often limited by the exponentially large dimension of the Hilbert space. Most existing approaches, such as compressed sensing and tensor network-based tomography, impose structural constraints on the state to enable more resource-efficient characterization. However, not all physical states can be well-approximated with highly structured states. Here, we develop a partial quantum tomography method based on direct fidelity estimation (DFE) that focuses on a neighborhood subspace -- the subspace spanned by states physically close to a given target state. Using this generalized DFE method, we estimate elements of the density operator within this subspace in a self-verifying manner. We investigate the efficiency of this approach under different sets of available measurements for various states and find that the set of available measurements significantly impacts the cost of DFE. For example, we show that Pauli measurements alone are insufficient for performing efficient DFE on all product states, whereas the full set of product measurements is sufficient. This method can be applied in many situations, including characterizing quantum systems with confined dynamics and verifying preparations of quantum states and processes.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Crosstalk-Robust Quantum Control in Multimode Bosonic Systems

High-coherence superconducting cavities offer a hardware-efficient platform for quantum information processing. To achieve universal operations of these bosonic modes, the requisite nonlinearity is realized by coupling them to a transmon ancilla. However, this configuration is susceptible to crosstalk errors in the dispersive regime, where the ancilla frequency is Stark-shifted by the state of each coupled bosonic mode. This leads to a frequency mismatch of the ancilla drive, lowering the gate fidelities. To mitigate such coherent errors, we employ quantum optimal control to engineer ancilla pulses that are robust to the frequency shifts. These optimized pulses are subsequently integrated into a recently developed echoed conditional displacement (ECD) protocol for executing single- and two-mode operations. Through numerical simulations, we examine two representative scenarios: the preparation of single-mode Fock states in the presence of spectator modes and the generation of two-mode entangled Bell-cat states. Our approach markedly suppresses crosstalk errors, outperforming conventional ancilla control methods by orders of magnitude. These results provide guidance for experimentally achieving high-fidelity multimode operations and pave the way for developing high-performance bosonic quantum information processors.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Suppression of quasiparticle poisoning in transmon qubits by gap engineering

The performance of various superconducting devices operating at ultra-low temperatures is impaired by the presence of non-equilibrium quasiparticles. Inelastic quasiparticle (QP) tunneling across Josephson junctions in superconducting qubits results in decoherence and spurious excitations and, notably, can trigger correlated errors that severely impede quantum error correction. In this work, we use "gap engineering" to suppress the tunneling of low-energy quasiparticles in Al-based transmon qubits, a leading building block for superconducting quantum processors. By implementing potential barriers for QP, we strongly suppress QP tunneling across the junction and preserve charge parity for over $10^3$ seconds. The suppression of QP tunneling also results in a reduction in the qubit energy relaxation rates. The demonstrated approach to gap engineering can be easily implemented in all Al-based circuits with Josephson junctions.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Multi-mode Cavity Centric Architectures for Quantum Simulation

Near-term quantum computing technologies grapple with huge complexity overheads, hindering their ability to induce algorithms, necessitating engineering and scientific innovations. One class of problems of interest is Quantum Simulation, whereby quantum systems are simulated using a quantum computer. However, current devices are yet to surpass classical tensor network techniques. For problems of interest, where classical simulation techniques fail, large degrees of entanglement are required. Another challenge of implementing quantum simulation problems is that qubits sit idle whilst alternating simulation terms are implemented, exposing the system to decoherence. In the near term, 2D planar superconducting lattices of circuit-QED elements such as the transmon continue to draw substantial attention, but they are hindered by their nearest neighbor topology and relatively short lifespan, two problems that are problematic for quantum simulation. One technology of particular interest is the multi-mode superconducting resonator capable of storing multiple qubits in one device. We observe that these cavities have a natural virtual topology that aligns particularly well with quantum simulation problems, and exhibit much longer lifespans in comparison to other planar superconducting hardware. In this paper we present MUCIC, we discuss the simple integration of these devices into the current landscape and their implications to quantum simulation, motivated by their alignment to the quantum simulation problem, and potential as a quantum memory candidate. We report the development of MUCICs transpiler, leading to reductions of up to 82% in quantum simulation circuit depths. Additionally, our investigation demonstrates improvements of up to 19.4% in converged results from Variational Quantum Algorithms.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Efficient multimode Wigner tomography

Advancements in quantum system lifetimes and control have enabled the creation of increasingly complex quantum states, such as those on multiple bosonic cavity modes. When characterizing these states, traditional tomography scales exponentially in both computational and experimental measurement requirement, which becomes prohibitive as the state size increases. Here, we implement a state reconstruction method whose sampling requirement instead scales polynomially with subspace size, and thus mode number, for states that can be expressed within such a subspace. We demonstrate this improved scaling with Wigner tomography of multimode entangled W states of up to 4 modes on a 3D circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) system. This approach performs similarly in efficiency to existing matrix inversion methods for 2 modes, and demonstrates a noticeable improvement for 3 and 4 modes, with even greater theoretical gains at higher mode numbers.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Microarchitectures for Heterogeneous Superconducting Quantum Computers

Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum Computing (NISQ) has dominated headlines in recent years, with the longer-term vision of Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computation (FTQC) offering significant potential albeit at currently intractable resource costs and quantum error correction (QEC) overheads. For problems of interest, FTQC will require millions of physical qubits with long coherence times, high-fidelity gates, and compact sizes to surpass classical systems. Just as heterogeneous specialization has offered scaling benefits in classical computing, it is likewise gaining interest in FTQC. However, systematic use of heterogeneity in either hardware or software elements of FTQC systems remains a serious challenge due to the vast design space and variable physical constraints. This paper meets the challenge of making heterogeneous FTQC design practical by introducing HetArch, a toolbox for designing heterogeneous quantum systems, and using it to explore heterogeneous design scenarios. Using a hierarchical approach, we successively break quantum algorithms into smaller operations (akin to classical application kernels), thus greatly simplifying the design space and resulting tradeoffs. Specializing to superconducting systems, we then design optimized heterogeneous hardware composed of varied superconducting devices, abstracting physical constraints into design rules that enable devices to be assembled into standard cells optimized for specific operations. Finally, we provide a heterogeneous design space exploration framework which reduces the simulation burden by a factor of 10^4 or more and allows us to characterize optimal design points. We use these techniques to design superconducting quantum modules for entanglement distillation, error correction, and code teleportation, reducing error rates by 2.6x, 10.7x, and 3.0x compared to homogeneous systems.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Stimulated emission of signal photons from dark matter waves

The manipulation of quantum states of light has resulted in significant advancements in both dark matter searches and gravitational wave detectors [1-4]. Current dark matter searches operating in the microwave frequency range use nearly quantum-limited amplifiers [3, 5, 6]. Future high frequency searches will use photon counting techniques [1] to evade the standard quantum limit. We present a signal enhancement technique that utilizes a superconducting qubit to prepare a superconducting microwave cavity in a non-classical Fock state and stimulate the emission of a photon from a dark matter wave. By initializing the cavity in an $|n=4\rangle$ Fock state, we demonstrate a quantum enhancement technique that increases the signal photon rate and hence also the dark matter scan rate each by a factor of 2.78. Using this technique, we conduct a dark photon search in a band around $\mathrm{5.965\, GHz \, (24.67\, μeV)}$, where the kinetic mixing angle $ε\geq 4.35 \times 10^{-13}$ is excluded at the $90\%$ confidence level.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2021

Chiral Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics

Cavity quantum electrodynamics, which explores the granularity of light by coupling a resonator to a nonlinear emitter, has played a foundational role in the development of modern quantum information science and technology. In parallel, the field of condensed matter physics has been revolutionized by the discovery of underlying topological robustness in the face of disorder, often arising from the breaking of time-reversal symmetry, as in the case of the quantum Hall effect. In this work, we explore for the first time cavity quantum electrodynamics of a transmon qubit in the topological vacuum of a Harper-Hofstadter topological lattice. To achieve this, we assemble a square lattice of niobium superconducting resonators and break time-reversal symmetry by introducing ferrimagnets before coupling the system to a single transmon qubit. We spectroscopically resolve the individual bulk and edge modes of this lattice, detect vacuum-stimulated Rabi oscillations between the excited transmon and each mode, and thereby measure the synthetic-vacuum-induced Lamb shift of the transmon. Finally, we demonstrate the ability to employ the transmon to count individual photons within each mode of the topological band structure. This work opens the field of chiral quantum optics experiment, suggesting new routes to topological many-body physics and offering unique approaches to backscatter-resilient quantum communication.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2021

Searching for Dark Matter with a Superconducting Qubit

Detection mechanisms for low mass bosonic dark matter candidates, such the axion or hidden photon, leverage potential interactions with electromagnetic fields, whereby the dark matter (of unknown mass) on rare occasion converts into a single photon. Current dark matter searches operating at microwave frequencies use a resonant cavity to coherently accumulate the field sourced by the dark matter and a near standard quantum limited (SQL) linear amplifier to read out the cavity signal. To further increase sensitivity to the dark matter signal, sub-SQL detection techniques are required. Here we report the development of a novel microwave photon counting technique and a new exclusion limit on hidden photon dark matter. We operate a superconducting qubit to make repeated quantum non-demolition measurements of cavity photons and apply a hidden Markov model analysis to reduce the noise to 15.7 dB below the quantum limit, with overall detector performance limited by a residual background of real photons. With the present device, we perform a hidden photon search and constrain the kinetic mixing angle to $ε\leq 1.68 \times 10^{-15}$ in a band around 6.011 GHz (24.86 $μ$eV) with an integration time of 8.33 s. This demonstrated noise reduction technique enables future dark matter searches to be sped up by a factor of 1300. By coupling a qubit to an arbitrary quantum sensor, more general sub-SQL metrology is possible with the techniques presented in this work.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2020

Seamless high-Q microwave cavities for multimode circuit QED

Multimode cavity quantum electrodynamics ---where a two-level system interacts simultaneously with many cavity modes---provides a versatile framework for quantum information processing and quantum optics. Due to the combination of long coherence times and large interaction strengths, one of the leading experimental platforms for cavity QED involves coupling a superconducting circuit to a 3D microwave cavity. In this work, we realize a 3D multimode circuit QED system with single photon lifetimes of $2$ ms and cooperativities of $0.5-1.5\times10^9$ across 9 modes of a novel seamless cavity. We demonstrate a variety of protocols for universal single-mode quantum control applicable across all cavity modes, using only a single drive line. We achieve this by developing a straightforward flute method for creating monolithic superconducting microwave cavities that reduces loss while simultaneously allowing control of the mode spectrum and mode-qubit interaction. We highlight the flexibility and ease of implementation of this technique by using it to fabricate a variety of 3D cavity geometries, providing a template for engineering multimode quantum systems with exceptionally low dissipation. This work is an important step towards realizing hardware efficient random access quantum memories and processors, and for exploring quantum many-body physics with photons.

quant-ph↗