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Fast unconditional reset and leakage reduction of a tunable superconducting qubit via an engineered dissipative bath

Gihwan Kim1,2,*, Andreas Butler1,2,*, Vinicius S. Ferreira1,2,†, Xueyue (Sherry) Zhang1,2,‡, Alex Hadley1, Eunjong Kim3,4, and Oskar Painter1,2,§

  • 1Kavli Nanoscience Institute and Thomas J. Watson, Sr., Laboratory of Applied Physics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA
  • 2Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA
  • 3Department of Physics & Astronomy, Seoul National University, Seoul 08826, South Korea
  • 4Institute of Applied Physics, Seoul National University, Seoul 08826, South Korea

  • *These authors contributed equally.
  • †Current address: Google Quantum AI, Santa Barbara, CA.
  • ‡Current address: Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027.
  • §Contact author: opainter@caltech.edu
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Phys. Rev. Applied 24, 014013 – Published 7 July, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/6wc6-78y3

Abstract

Rapid and accurate initialization of qubits, known as reset, is a crucial building block for various tasks in quantum information processing, such as quantum error correction and estimation of the statistics of noisy quantum devices with many qubits. We demonstrate unconditional reset of a frequency-tunable transmon qubit that simultaneously resets multiple excited states using a metamaterial waveguide engineered to provide a cold bath over a wide spectral range, while providing strong protection against Purcell decay of the qubit. We report a reset error below 0.13% (0.16%) when prepared in the first (second) excited state of the transmon within 88 ns. In addition, through the sharp roll-off in the density of states of the metamaterial waveguide, we implement a leakage-reduction unit that selectively resets the transmon’s second excited state to 0.285(3)% residual population within 44 ns while acting trivially in the computational subspace as an identity operation that preserves encoded information with an infidelity of 0.72(1)%.

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Phys. Rev. Applied 24, 014013– Published 7 July, 2025
  • Received 26 November 2024
  • Revised 14 February 2025
  • Accepted 5 June 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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