arXiv subjects

Xiaohui Song

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaohui Song.

53 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

High-precision pulse calibration of tunable couplers for high-fidelity two-qubit gates in superconducting quantum processors

For superconducting quantum processors, stable high-fidelity two-qubit operations depend on precise flux control of the tunable coupler. However, the pulse distortion poses a significant challenge to the control precision. Current calibration methods, which often rely on microwave crosstalk or additional readout resonators for coupler excitation and readout, tend to be cumbersome and inefficient, especially when couplers only have flux control. Here, we introduce and experimentally validate a novel pulse calibration scheme that exploits the strong coupling between qubits and couplers, eliminating the need for extra coupler readout and excitation. Our method directly measures the short-time and long-time step responses of the coupler flux pulse transient, enabling us to apply predistortion to subsequent signals using fast Fourier transformation and deconvolution. This approach not only simplifies the calibration process but also significantly improves the precision and stability of the flux control. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method through the implementation of diabatic CZ and iSWAP gates with fidelities of $99.61\pm0.04\%$ and $99.82\pm0.02\%$, respectively, as well as a series of diabatic CPhase gates with high fidelities characterized by cross-entropy benchmarking. The consistency and robustness of our technique are further validated by the reduction in pulse distortion and phase error observed across multilayer CZ gates. These results underscore the potential of our calibration and predistortion method to enhance the performance of two-qubit gates in superconducting quantum processors.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Probing spin hydrodynamics on a superconducting quantum simulator

Characterizing the nature of hydrodynamical transport properties in quantum dynamics provides valuable insights into the fundamental understanding of exotic non-equilibrium phases of matter. Experimentally simulating infinite-temperature transport on large-scale complex quantum systems is of considerable interest. Here, using a controllable and coherent superconducting quantum simulator, we experimentally realize the analog quantum circuit, which can efficiently prepare the Haar-random states, and probe spin transport at infinite temperature. We observe diffusive spin transport during the unitary evolution of the ladder-type quantum simulator with ergodic dynamics. Moreover, we explore the transport properties of the systems subjected to strong disorder or a tilted potential, revealing signatures of anomalous subdiffusion in accompany with the breakdown of thermalization. Our work demonstrates a scalable method of probing infinite-temperature spin transport on analog quantum simulators, which paves the way to study other intriguing out-of-equilibrium phenomena from the perspective of transport.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Tunable coupling of a quantum phononic resonator to a transmon qubit with flip-chip architecture

A hybrid system with tunable coupling between phonons and qubits shows great potential for advancing quantum information processing. In this work, we demonstrate strong and tunable coupling between a surface acoustic wave (SAW) resonator and a transmon qubit based on galvanic-contact flip-chip technique. The coupling strength varies from $2π\times$7.0 MHz to -$2π\times$20.6 MHz, which is extracted from different vacuum Rabi oscillation frequencies. The phonon-induced ac Stark shift of the qubit at different coupling strengths is also shown. Our approach offers a good experimental platform for exploring quantum acoustics and hybrid systems.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Simulating Chern insulators on a superconducting quantum processor

The quantum Hall effect, fundamental in modern condensed matter physics, continuously inspires new theories and predicts emergent phases of matter. Here we experimentally demonstrate three types of Chern insulators with synthetic dimensions on a programable 30-qubit-ladder superconducting processor. We directly measure the band structures of the 2D Chern insulator along synthetic dimensions with various configurations of Aubry-André-Harper chains and observe dynamical localisation of edge excitations. With these two signatures of topology, our experiments implement the bulk-edge correspondence in the synthetic 2D Chern insulator. Moreover, we simulate two different bilayer Chern insulators on the ladder-type superconducting processor. With the same and opposite periodically modulated on-site potentials for two coupled chains, we simulate topologically nontrivial edge states with zero Hall conductivity and a Chern insulator with higher Chern numbers, respectively. Our work shows the potential of using superconducting qubits for investigating different intriguing topological phases of quantum matter.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Observation of multiple steady states with engineered dissipation

Simulating the dynamics of open quantum systems is essential in achieving practical quantum computation and understanding novel nonequilibrium behaviors. However, quantum simulation of a many-body system coupled to an engineered reservoir has yet to be fully explored in present-day experiment platforms. In this work, we introduce engineered noise into a one-dimensional ten-qubit superconducting quantum processor to emulate a generic many-body open quantum system. Our approach originates from the stochastic unravellings of the master equation. By measuring the end-to-end correlation, we identify multiple steady states stemmed from a strong symmetry, which is established on the modified Hamiltonian via Floquet engineering. Furthermore, we find that the information saved in the initial state maintains in the steady state driven by the continuous dissipation on a five-qubit chain. Our work provides a manageable and hardware-efficient strategy for the open-system quantum simulation.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Quantum simulation of topological zero modes on a 41-qubit superconducting processor

Quantum simulation of different exotic topological phases of quantum matter on a noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) processor is attracting growing interest. Here, we develop a one-dimensional 43-qubit superconducting quantum processor, named as Chuang-tzu, to simulate and characterize emergent topological states. By engineering diagonal Aubry-Andr$\acute{\mathrm{e}}$-Harper (AAH) models, we experimentally demonstrate the Hofstadter butterfly energy spectrum. Using Floquet engineering, we verify the existence of the topological zero modes in the commensurate off-diagonal AAH models, which have never been experimentally realized before. Remarkably, the qubit number over 40 in our quantum processor is large enough to capture the substantial topological features of a quantum system from its complex band structure, including Dirac points, the energy gap's closing, the difference between even and odd number of sites, and the distinction between edge and bulk states. Our results establish a versatile hybrid quantum simulation approach to exploring quantum topological systems in the NISQ era.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Quantum simulation of Hawking radiation and curved spacetime with a superconducting on-chip black hole

Hawking radiation is one of the quantum features of a black hole that can be understood as a quantum tunneling across the event horizon of the black hole, but it is quite difficult to directly observe the Hawking radiation of an astrophysical black hole. Here, we report a fermionic lattice-model-type realization of an analogue black hole by using a chain of 10 superconducting transmon qubits with interactions mediated by 9 transmon-type tunable couplers. The quantum walks of quasi-particle in the curved spacetime reflect the gravitational effect near the black hole, resulting in the behaviour of stimulated Hawking radiation, which is verified by the state tomography measurement of all 7 qubits outside the horizon. In addition, the dynamics of entanglement in the curved spacetime is directly measured. Our results would stimulate more interests to explore the related features of black holes using the programmable superconducting processor with tunable couplers.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Quasiparticle poisoning rate in a superconducting transmon qubit involving Majorana zero modes

Majorana zero modes have been attracting considerable attention because of their prospective applications in fault-tolerant topological quantum computing. In recent years, some schemes have been proposed to detect and manipulate Majorana zero modes using superconducting qubits. However, manipulating and reading the Majorana zero modes must be kept in the time window of quasiparticle poisoning. In this work, we study the problem of quasiparticle poisoning in a split transmon qubit containing hybrid Josephson junctions involving Majorana zero modes. We show that Majorana coupling will cause parity mixing and 4π Josephson effect. In addition, we obtained the expression of qubit parameter-dependent parity switching rate and demonstrated that quasiparticle poisoning can be greatly suppressed by reducing E_J/E_C via qubit design.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Supervised Prototypical Contrastive Learning for Emotion Recognition in Conversation

Capturing emotions within a conversation plays an essential role in modern dialogue systems. However, the weak correlation between emotions and semantics brings many challenges to emotion recognition in conversation (ERC). Even semantically similar utterances, the emotion may vary drastically depending on contexts or speakers. In this paper, we propose a Supervised Prototypical Contrastive Learning (SPCL) loss for the ERC task. Leveraging the Prototypical Network, the SPCL targets at solving the imbalanced classification problem through contrastive learning and does not require a large batch size. Meanwhile, we design a difficulty measure function based on the distance between classes and introduce curriculum learning to alleviate the impact of extreme samples. We achieve state-of-the-art results on three widely used benchmarks. Further, we conduct analytical experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed SPCL and curriculum learning strategy. We release the code at https://github.com/caskcsg/SPCL.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2022

Observation of entanglement negativity transition of pseudo-random mixed states

Multipartite entanglement is a key resource for quantum computation. It is expected theoretically that entanglement transition may happen for multipartite random quantum states, however, which is still absent experimentally. Here, we report the observation of entanglement transition quantified by negativity using a fully connected 20-qubit superconducting processor. We implement multi-layer pseudo-random circuits to generate pseudo-random pure states of 7 to 15 qubits. Then, we investigate negativity spectra of reduced density matrices obtained by quantum state tomography for 6 qubits.Three different phases can be identified by calculating logarithmic negativities based on the negativity spectra. We observe the phase transitions by changing the sizes of environment and subsystems. The randomness of our circuits can be also characterized by quantifying the distance between the distribution of output bit-string probabilities and Porter-Thomas distribution. Our simulator provides a powerful tool to generate random states and understand the entanglement structure for multipartite quantum systems.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Observation of critical phase transition in a generalized Aubry-André-Harper model on a superconducting quantum processor with tunable couplers

Quantum simulation enables study of many-body systems in non-equilibrium by mapping to a controllable quantum system, providing a new tool for computational intractable problems. Here, using a programmable quantum processor with a chain of 10 superconducting qubits interacted through tunable couplers, we simulate the one-dimensional generalized Aubry-André-Harper model for three different phases, i.e., extended, localized and critical phases. The properties of phase transitions and many-body dynamics are studied in the presence of quasi-periodic modulations for both off-diagonal hopping coefficients and on-site potentials of the model controlled respectively by adjusting strength of couplings and qubit frequencies. We observe the spin transport for initial single- and multi-excitation states in different phases, and characterize phase transitions by experimentally measuring dynamics of participation entropies. Our experimental results demonstrate that the newly developed tunable coupling architecture of superconducting processor extends greatly the simulation realms for a wide variety of Hamiltonians, and may trigger further investigations on various quantum and topological phenomena.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Observation of Emergent $\mathbb{Z}_2$ Gauge Invariance in a Superconducting Circuit

Lattice gauge theories (LGTs) are one of the most fundamental subjects in many-body physics, and has recently attracted considerable research interests in quantum simulations. Here we experimentally investigate the emergent $\mathbb{Z}_2$ gauge invariance in a 1D superconducting circuit with 10 transmon qubits. By precisely adjusting staggered longitudinal and transverse fields to each qubit, we construct an effective Hamiltonian containing an LGT and gauge-broken terms. The corresponding matter sector can exhibit a localization, and there also exists a 3-qubit operator, of which the expectation value can retain nonzero for a long time in low-energy regimes. The above localization can be regarded as the confinement of matter fields, and the 3-body operator is the $\mathbb{Z}_2$ gauge generator. These experimental results demonstrate that, despite the absence of gauge structure in the effective Hamiltonian, $\mathbb{Z}_2$ gauge invariance can still emerge in low-energy regimes. Our work provides a method for both theoretically and experimentally studying the rich physics in quantum many-body systems with emergent gauge invariance.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2021

Rapid and Unconditional Parametric Reset Protocol for Tunable Superconducting Qubits

Qubit initialization is a critical task in quantum computation and communication. Extensive efforts have been made to achieve this with high speed, efficiency and scalability. However, previous approaches have either been measurement-based and required fast feedback, suffered from crosstalk or required sophisticated calibration. Here, we report a fast and high-fidelity reset scheme, avoiding the issues above without any additional chip architecture. By modulating the flux through a transmon qubit, we realize a swap between the qubit and its readout resonator that suppresses the excited state population to 0.08% $\pm$ 0.08% within 34 ns (284 ns if photon depletion of the resonator is required). Furthermore, our approach (i) can achieve effective second excited state depletion, (ii) has negligible effects on neighbouring qubits, and (iii) offers a way to entangle the qubit with an itinerant single photon, useful in quantum communication applications.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2021

Metrological characterisation of non-Gaussian entangled states of superconducting qubits

Multipartite entangled states are significant resources for both quantum information processing and quantum metrology. In particular, non-Gaussian entangled states are predicted to achieve a higher sensitivity of precision measurements than Gaussian states. On the basis of metrological sensitivity, the conventional linear Ramsey squeezing parameter (RSP) efficiently characterises the Gaussian entangled atomic states but fails for much wider classes of highly sensitive non-Gaussian states. These complex non-Gaussian entangled states can be classified by the nonlinear squeezing parameter (NLSP), as a generalisation of the RSP with respect to nonlinear observables, and identified via the Fisher information. However, the NLSP has never been measured experimentally. Using a 19-qubit programmable superconducting processor, here we report the characterisation of multiparticle entangled states generated during its nonlinear dynamics. First, selecting 10 qubits, we measure the RSP and the NLSP by single-shot readouts of collective spin operators in several different directions. Then, by extracting the Fisher information of the time-evolved state of all 19 qubits, we observe a large metrological gain of 9.89$^{+0.28}_{-0.29}$ dB over the standard quantum limit, indicating a high level of multiparticle entanglement for quantum-enhanced phase sensitivity. Benefiting from high-fidelity full controls and addressable single-shot readouts, the superconducting processor with interconnected qubits provides an ideal platform for engineering and benchmarking non-Gaussian entangled states that are useful for quantum-enhanced metrology.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2021

Observation of Bloch Oscillations and Wannier-Stark Localization on a Superconducting Processor

The Bloch oscillation (BO) and Wannier-Stark localization (WSL) are fundamental concepts about metal-insulator transitions in condensed matter physics. These phenomena have also been observed in semiconductor superlattices and simulated in platforms such as photonic waveguide arrays and cold atoms. Here, we report experimental investigation of BOs and WSL simulated with a 5-qubit programmable superconducting processor, of which the effective Hamiltonian is an isotropic $XY$ spin chain. When applying a linear potential to the system by properly tuning all individual qubits, we observe that the propagation of a single spin on the chain is suppressed. It tends to oscillate near the neighborhood of their initial positions, which demonstrates the characteristics of BOs and WSL. We verify that the WSL length is inversely correlated to the potential gradient. Benefiting from the precise single-shot simultaneous readout of all qubits in our experiments, we can also investigate the thermal transport, which requires the joint measurement of more than one qubits. The experimental results show that, as an essential characteristic for BOs and WSL, the thermal transport is also blocked under a linear potential. Our experiment would be scalable to more superconducting qubits for simulating various of out-of-equilibrium problems in quantum many-body systems.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2020

Data Augmentation for Copy-Mechanism in Dialogue State Tracking

While several state-of-the-art approaches to dialogue state tracking (DST) have shown promising performances on several benchmarks, there is still a significant performance gap between seen slot values (i.e., values that occur in both training set and test set) and unseen ones (values that occur in training set but not in test set). Recently, the copy-mechanism has been widely used in DST models to handle unseen slot values, which copies slot values from user utterance directly. In this paper, we aim to find out the factors that influence the generalization ability of a common copy-mechanism model for DST. Our key observations include: 1) the copy-mechanism tends to memorize values rather than infer them from contexts, which is the primary reason for unsatisfactory generalization performance; 2) greater diversity of slot values in the training set increase the performance on unseen values but slightly decrease the performance on seen values. Moreover, we propose a simple but effective algorithm of data augmentation to train copy-mechanism models, which augments the input dataset by copying user utterances and replacing the real slot values with randomly generated strings. Users could use two hyper-parameters to realize a trade-off between the performances on seen values and unseen ones, as well as a trade-off between overall performance and computational cost. Experimental results on three widely used datasets (WoZ 2.0, DSTC2, and Multi-WoZ 2.0) show the effectiveness of our approach.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

Generation and controllable switching of superradiant and subradiant states in a 10-qubit superconducting circuit

Superradiance and subradiance concerning enhanced and inhibited collective radiation of an ensemble of atoms have been a central topic in quantum optics. However, precise generation and control of these states remain challenging. Here we deterministically generate up to 10-qubit superradiant and 8-qubit subradiant states, each containing a single excitation, in a superconducting quantum circuit with multiple qubits interconnected by a cavity resonator. The $\sqrt{N}$-scaling enhancement of the coupling strength between the superradiant states and the cavity is validated. By applying appropriate phase gate on each qubit, we are able to switch the single collective excitation between superradiant and subradiant states. While the subradiant states containing a single excitation are forbidden from emitting photons, we demonstrate that they can still absorb photons from the resonator. However, for even number of qubits, a singlet state with half of the qubits being excited can neither emit nor absorb photons, which is verified with 4 qubits. This study is a step forward in coherent control of collective radiation and has promising applications in quantum information processing.

quant-ph↗