arXiv subjects

Yvonne Y. Gao

Publications and source records attributed to Yvonne Y. Gao.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

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.

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arXiv2026

Programming anharmonic potentials in a superconducting harmonic oscillator

Continuous-variable quantum systems offer a resource-efficient route to universal quantum information processing and analogue quantum simulation of real-world processes, such as molecular physics and chemical reactions. Realising these applications, however, requires non-Gaussian operations that implement anharmonic potentials, which are challenging to engineer on demand. Here, we demonstrate a systematic framework to implement programmable non-Gaussian phase gates $e^{-iV(\hat{X})}$, corresponding to the impulsive action of a potential $V(\hat{X})$, in a superconducting harmonic oscillator coupled to a transmon qubit. Using modular circuits derived from bosonic quantum signal processing, we realise a range of target anharmonic potentials on a single piece of hardware by varying a set of qubit rotations interleaved with a fixed calibrated control unitary. We first demonstrate a cubic phase gate, a key ingredient for universal quantum information processing. The resulting high-fidelity non-Gaussian states and the potential reconstructed using our pointwise force reconstruction method jointly confirm the cubic nature of the target gate. We then engineer a family of double-well potentials, relevant models of tunnelling and biased transfer processes, and experimentally validate the double-well topology and the tunable asymmetry. Finally, we engineer an approximate Morse gate, a step towards realistic potentials of molecular vibrational systems, and provide a concrete path towards high-quality engineering and reconstruction of the exponential form. Together, these results establish a practical and reconfigurable route towards continuous-variable quantum information processing and anharmonic quantum simulation.

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arXiv2026

Demonstration of tripartite cat states in two distinct classes of entanglement

Entanglement is a cornerstone of quantum mechanics and an essential resource for quantum computation, communication, and metrology. While bipartite entanglement is extensively studied, genuine multipartite entangled states remain largely inaccessible in the macroscopic continuous-variable domain. Here, we experimentally realize macroscopic tripartite entangled cat states of the two distinct classes with fundamentally inequivalent properties, namely GHZ-cat and W-cat states, encoded across three microwave resonators coupled to an ancillary superconducting transmon. We develop one-to-all conditional controls on the three oscillators by fully utilizing three energy levels of the transmon to generate these states in a single piece of hardware and employ an efficient subspace tomography protocol for state reconstruction. We obtain GHZ-cat and W-cat states with fidelities $0.83\pm0.02$ and $0.70\pm0.02$, respectively, certifying genuine multipartite entanglement among the three oscillators. We further validate the distinct entanglement classes by experimentally demonstrating that pairwise entanglement is present in the W-cat state but absent in the GHZ-cat state. Our technique for the on-demand generation and characterization of inequivalent classes of tripartite continuous-variable entanglement provides a valuable testbed for future studies of macroscopic many-body entanglement and fault-tolerant quantum information processing with multipartite bosonic codes.

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arXiv2026

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.

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arXiv2026

Direct estimation of arbitrary observables of an oscillator

Quantum harmonic oscillators serve as fundamental building blocks for quantum information processing, particularly in the context of the bosonic circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) platform. Conventional methods for extracting oscillator properties rely on predefined analytical gate sequences to access a restricted set of observables or resource-intensive tomography processes. Here, we introduce the Optimized Routine for Estimation of any Observable (OREO), a numerically optimized protocol that maps the expectation value of arbitrary oscillator observables onto that of an ancillary qubit. We demonstrate OREO in a bosonic cQED system as a means to efficiently measure phase-space quadratures and their higher moments, directly obtain faithful non-Gaussianity ranks, and effectively achieve state preparation independent of initial conditions in the oscillator. These results position OREO as a valuable tool for direct and efficient information extraction from bosonic quantum states, unlocking new possibilities for measurement, control, and state preparation in continuous-variable quantum information processing.

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arXiv2026

Flux-Activated Resonant Control of a Bosonic Quantum Memory

Universal control of bosonic degrees of freedom provides a hardware-efficient route for quantum information processing with high-dimensional systems. Bosonic circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED), which leverages auxillary transmons to coherently control long-lived superconducting cavities, is well suited to this goal. However, such systems are traditionally operated in the dispersive regime, where the nearly degenerate cavity transitions prohibit the direct addressability of individual excitation levels of the bosonic mode and increase gate complexity. Here, we achieve direct oscillator control by dynamically accessing the resonant Jaynes-Cummings (JC) interactions, implemented with a hardware that integrates on-chip broadband magnetic flux delivery with a bosonic memory housed in a 3D superconducting cavity with lifetime exceeding 0.5 ms. We demonstrate deterministic preparation of Fock states and their superpositions within 100s of nanoseconds by directly climbing the JC ladder, and realise efficient arbitrary rotations between any pair of Fock states. Our resonant control scheme provides an analytical method for manipulating the entire Hilbert space of the bosonic mode at rates fundamentally more favourable than traditional dispersive strategies. This on-demand access to JC interactions opens a promising path toward realising robust Fock-basis qudits and harnessing the rich dynamics of high-dimensional bosonic systems for quantum information processing.

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arXiv2025

Enhanced Qubit Readout via Reinforcement Learning

Measurement is an essential component of robust and practical quantum computation. For superconducting qubits, the measurement process involves the effective manipulation of the joint qubit-resonator dynamics, and it should ideally provide the highest quality for qubit state discrimination with the shortest readout pulse and resonator reset time. Here, we harness model-free reinforcement learning (RL), together with a tailored training environment, to achieve this multi-pronged optimization task. Using the IBM quantum device, we demonstrate that the pulse obtained by the RL agent not only successfully achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an assignment error of $(4.6 \pm 0.4)\times10^{-3}$, but also executes the readout and the subsequent resonator reset almost three times faster than the system's default process. Furthermore, the learned waveforms are robust against realistic parameter drifts and follow a generalized analytical form, making them readily implementable in practice with no significant computation overhead. Our results provide an effective readout strategy to boost the performance of superconducting quantum processors and demonstrate the prowess of RL in providing optimal and experimentally informed solutions for complex quantum information processing tasks.

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arXiv2025

Experimental demonstration of enhanced quantum tomography via quantum reservoir processing

Quantum machine learning is a rapidly advancing discipline that leverages the features of quantum mechanics to enhance the performance of computational tasks. Quantum reservoir processing, which allows efficient optimization of a single output layer without precise control over the quantum system, stands out as one of the most versatile and practical quantum machine learning techniques. Here we experimentally demonstrate a quantum reservoir processing approach for continuous-variable state reconstruction on a bosonic circuit quantum electrodynamics platform. The scheme learns the true dynamical process through a minimum set of measurement outcomes of a known set of initial states. We show that the map learnt this way achieves high reconstruction fidelity for several test states, offering significantly enhanced performance over using a map calculated based on an idealised model of the system. This is due to a key feature of reservoir processing which accurately accounts for physical non-idealities such as decoherence, spurious dynamics, and systematic errors. Our results present a valuable tool for robust bosonic state and process reconstruction, concretely demonstrating the power of quantum reservoir processing in enhancing real-world applications.

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arXiv2025

Realization of versatile and effective quantum metrology using a single bosonic mode

Quantum metrology offers the potential to surpass its classical counterpart, pushing the boundaries of measurement precision toward the ultimate Heisenberg limit. This enhanced precision is normally attained by utilizing large squeezed states or multi-particle entangled quantum states, both of which are often challenging to implement and prone to decoherence in real quantum devices. In this work, we present a versatile and on-demand protocol for deterministic parameter estimation that leverages two efficient state-transfer operations on a single bosonic mode. Specifically, we demonstrate this protocol in the context of phase estimation using the superposition of coherent states in the bosonic circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) platform. With low average photon numbers of only up to 1.76, we achieve quantum-enhanced precision approaching the Heisenberg scaling, reaching a metrological gain of 7.5(6) dB. Importantly, we show that the gain or sensitivity range can be further enhanced on the fly by tailoring the input states, with different superposition weights, based on specific system constraints. The realization of this versatile and efficient scheme affords a promising path towards practical quantum-enhanced sensing, not only for bosonic cQED hardware but also readily extensible to other continuous-variable platforms.

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arXiv2025

Demonstrating efficient and robust bosonic state reconstruction via optimized excitation counting

Quantum state reconstruction is an essential element in quantum information processing. However, efficient and reliable reconstruction of non-trivial quantum states in the presence of hardware imperfections can be challenging. This task is particularly demanding for high-dimensional states encoded in continuous-variable (CV) systems, where a large number of grid-based measurements are often used to adequately sample relevant regions of phase space. In this work, we introduce an efficient and robust technique of Optimized Reconstruction with Excitation Number Sampling (ORENS) based on the idea of generalized Q-function. We use a standard bosonic circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) setup to experimentally demonstrate effective state reconstruction using the theoretically minimum number of measurements. Our investigation highlights that ORENS is naturally free of parasitic system dynamics and resilient to decoherence effects in the hardware, enabling it to outperform the conventional reconstruction techniques in cQED such as Wigner tomography. Finally, ORENS relies only on the ability to accurately measure the excitation number of a given CV state, making it a versatile and accessible tool for a wide range of CV platforms and readily scalable to multimode systems. Thus, our work provides a crucial and valuable primitive for practical quantum information processing using bosonic modes.

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arXiv2024

Shaping photons: quantum computation with bosonic cQED

With its rich dynamics, the quantum harmonic oscillator is an innate platform for understanding real-world quantum systems and could even excel as the heart of a quantum computer. A particularly promising and rapidly advancing platform that harnesses quantum harmonic oscillators for information processing is the bosonic circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) system. In this article, we provide perspectives on the progress, challenges, and future directions in building a bosonic cQED quantum computer. We describe the main hardware building blocks and how they facilitate quantum error correction, metrology, and simulation. We conclude with our views of the key challenges that lie on the horizon, as well as scientific and cultural strategies for overcoming them and building a practical quantum computer with bosonic cQED hardware.

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arXiv2023

On-demand transposition across light-matter interaction regimes in bosonic cQED

The diverse applications of light-matter interactions in science and technology stem from the qualitatively distinct ways these interactions manifest, prompting the development of physical platforms that can interchange between regimes on demand. Bosonic cQED employs the light field of high-Q superconducting cavities coupled to non-linear circuit elements, harnessing the rich dynamics of their interaction for quantum information processing. However, implementing fast switching of the interaction regime without deteriorating the cavity coherence is a significant challenge. We present the first experiment to achieve this feat, combining nanosecond-scale frequency tunability of a transmon coupled to a cavity with lifetime of hundreds of microseconds. Our implementation affords a range of new capabilities for quantum information processing; from fast creation of cavity Fock states using resonant interaction and interchanging tomography techniques at qualitatively distinct interaction regimes on the fly, to the suppression of unwanted cavity-transmon dynamics during idle evolution. By bringing flux tunability into the bosonic cQED toolkit, our work opens up a new paradigm to probe the full range of light-matter interaction dynamics within a single platform and provides valuable new pathways towards robust and versatile quantum information processing.

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arXiv2022

Protecting the quantum interference of cat states by phase-space compression

Cat states, with their unique phase-space interference properties, are ideal candidates for understanding fundamental principles of quantum mechanics and performing key quantum information processing tasks. However, they are highly susceptible to photon loss, which inevitably diminishes their quantum non-Gaussian features. Here, we protect these non-Gaussian features against photon loss by compressing the phase-space distribution of a cat state. We achieve this compression with a deterministic technique based on the echo conditional displacement operation in a circuit QED device. We present a versatile technique for creating robust non-Gaussian continuous-variable resource states in a highly linear bosonic mode and manipulating their phase-space distribution to achieve enhanced resilience against photon loss. Compressed cat states offer an attractive avenue for obtaining new insights into quantum foundations and quantum metrology, and for developing inherently more protected bosonic codewords for quantum error correction.

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arXiv2021

A practical guide for building superconducting quantum devices

Quantum computing offers a powerful new paradigm of information processing that has the potential to transform a wide range of industries. In the pursuit of the tantalizing promises of a universal quantum computer, a multitude of new knowledge and expertise has been developed, enabling the construction of novel quantum algorithms as well as increasingly robust quantum hardware. In particular, we have witnessed rapid progress in the circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) technology, which has emerged as one of the most promising physical systems that is capable of addressing the key challenges in realizing full-stack quantum computing on a large scale. In this article, we present some of the most crucial building blocks developed by the cQED community in recent years and a précis of the latest achievements towards robust universal quantum computation. More importantly, we aim to provide a synoptic outline of the core techniques that underlie most cQED experiments and offer a practical guide for a novice experimentalist to design, construct, and characterize their first quantum device

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arXiv2021

Quantum information processing with bosonic qubits in circuit QED

The unique features of quantum theory offer a powerful new paradigm for information processing. Translating these mathematical abstractions into useful algorithms and applications requires quantum systems with significant complexity and sufficiently low error rates. Such quantum systems must be made from robust hardware that can coherently store, process, and extract the encoded information, as well as possess effective quantum error correction (QEC) protocols to detect and correct errors. Circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) provides a promising hardware platform for implementing robust quantum devices. In particular, bosonic encodings in cQED that use multi-photon states of superconducting cavities to encode information have shown success in realizing hardware-efficient QEC. Here, we review recent developments in the theory and implementation of quantum error correction with bosonic codes and report the progress made towards realizing fault-tolerant quantum information processing with cQED devices.

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arXiv2019

Efficient multiphoton sampling of molecular vibronic spectra on a superconducting bosonic processor

The efficient simulation of quantum systems is a primary motivating factor for developing controllable quantum machines. For addressing systems with underlying bosonic structure, it is advantageous to utilize a naturally bosonic platform. Optical photons passing through linear networks may be configured to perform quantum simulation tasks, but the efficient preparation and detection of multiphoton quantum states of light in linear optical systems are challenging. Here, we experimentally implement a boson sampling protocol for simulating molecular vibronic spectra [Nature Photonics $\textbf{9}$, 615 (2015)] in a two-mode superconducting device. In addition to enacting the requisite set of Gaussian operations across both modes, we fulfill the scalability requirement by demonstrating, for the first time in any platform, a high-fidelity single-shot photon number resolving detection scheme capable of resolving up to 15 photons per mode. Furthermore, we exercise the capability of synthesizing non-Gaussian input states to simulate spectra of molecular ensembles in vibrational excited states. We show the re-programmability of our implementation by extracting the spectra of photoelectron processes in H$_2$O, O$_3$, NO$_2$, and SO$_2$. The capabilities highlighted in this work establish the superconducting architecture as a promising platform for bosonic simulations, and by combining them with tools such as Kerr interactions and engineered dissipation, enable the simulation of a wider class of bosonic systems.

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arXiv2019

Engineering bilinear mode coupling in circuit QED: Theory and experiment

Photonic states of superconducting microwave cavities controlled by transmon ancillas provide a platform for encoding and manipulating quantum information. A key challenge in scaling up the platform is the requirement to communicate on demand the information between the cavities. It has been recently demonstrated that a tunable bilinear interaction between two cavities can be realized by coupling them to a bichromatically-driven transmon ancilla, which allows swapping and interfering the multi-photon states of the cavities [Gao et al., Phys. Rev. X 8, 021073(2018)]. Here, we explore both theoretically and experimentally the regime of relatively strong drives on the ancilla needed to achieve fast SWAP gates but which can also lead to undesired non-perturbative effects that lower the SWAP fidelity. We develop a theoretical formalism based on linear response theory that allows one to calculate the rate of ancilla-induced interaction, decay and frequency shift of the cavities in terms of a susceptibility matrix. We treat the drives non-perturbatively using Floquet theory, and find that the interference of the two drives can strongly alter the system dynamics even in the regime where the rotating wave approximation applies. We identify two major sources of infidelity due to ancilla decoherence. i) Ancilla dissipation and dephasing leads to incoherent hopping among Floquet states which occurs even when the ancilla is at zero temperature, resulting in a sudden change of the SWAP rate. ii) The cavities inherit finite decay from the relatively lossy ancilla through the inverse Purcell effect; the effect can be enhanced when the drive-induced AC Stark shift pushes certain ancilla transition frequencies to the vicinity of the cavity frequencies. The theoretical predictions agree quantitatively with the experimental results, paving the way for using the theory to design future experiments.

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arXiv2018

Entangling Bosonic Modes via an Engineered Exchange Interaction

The realization of robust universal quantum computation with any platform ultimately requires both the coherent storage of quantum information and (at least) one entangling operation between individual elements. The use of continuous-variable bosonic modes as the quantum element is a promising route to preserve the coherence of quantum information against naturally-occurring errors. However, operations between bosonic modes can be challenging. In analogy to the exchange interaction between discrete-variable spin systems, the exponential-SWAP unitary [$\mathbf{U}_{\mathrm{E}}\left(θ_c\right)$] can coherently transfer the states between two bosonic modes, regardless of the chosen encoding, realizing a deterministic entangling operation for certain $θ_c$. Here, we develop an efficient circuit to implement $\mathbf{U}_{\mathrm{E}}\left(θ_c\right)$ and realize the operation in a three-dimensional circuit QED architecture. We demonstrate high-quality deterministic entanglement between two cavity modes with several different encodings. Our results provide a crucial primitive necessary for universal quantum computation using bosonic modes.

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