The ability to transmit quantum states over long distances is a fundamental requirement of the quantum internet and is reliant upon quantum repeaters. Quantum repeaters involve entangled photon sources that emit and deliver photonic entangled states at high rates and quantum memories that can temporarily store quantum states. Improvement of the entanglement distribution rate is essential for quantum repeaters, and multiplexing is expected to be a breakthrough. However, limited studies exist on multiplexed photon sources and their coupling with a multiplexed quantum memory. Here, we demonstrate the storing of a frequency-multiplexed two-photon source at telecommunication wavelengths in a quantum memory accepting visible wavelengths via wavelength conversion after 10-km distribution. To achieve this, quantum systems are connected via wavelength conversion with a frequency-stabilization system and a noise-reduction system. The developed system is stably operated for more than 42 h. Therefore, it can be applied to quantum repeater systems comprising various physical systems requiring long-term system stability.

We report the realization of a strong coupling between a $\mathrm{Gd}$${}^{3+}$ spin ensemble hosted in a scheelite ($\mathrm{CaWO}$${}_4$) single crystal and the resonant mode of a coplanar-strip-line superconducting cavity leading to a large separation of spin-photon states of 146 MHz. The interaction is well described by the Dicke model and the crystal-field Hamiltonian of the multilevel spin system. We observe a change of the crystal-field parameters due to the presence of photons in the cavity, which generates a significant perturbation of the crystal ground state. Using finite-element calculations, we numerically estimate the cavity sensing volume as well as the average spin-photon coupling strength of $g_0/2\pi \approx 620\mathrm{Hz}$. Lastly, the dynamics of the spin-cavity states are explored via pulsed measurements by recording the cavity ring-down signal as a function of the pulse length and the amplitude. The results indicate a potential method to initialize this multilevel system in its ground state via an active cooling process.

In this work, we study a series of tunable flux qubits inductively coupled to a coplanar waveguide resonator fabricated on a sapphire substrate. Each qubit includes an asymmetric superconducting quantum interference device, which is controlled by the application of an external magnetic field and acts as a tunable Josephson junction. The tunability of the qubits is typically $\pm 3.5\mathrm{GHz}$ around their central gap frequency. The measured relaxation times are limited by dielectric losses in the substrate and can attain $T_1\sim 8\text{μ}\mathrm{s}$. The echo dephasing times are limited by flux noise even at optimal points and reach $T_{2E}\sim 4\text{μ}\mathrm{s}$, almost an order of magnitude longer than state of the art.

In two-qubit gates activated by microwave pulses, by turning the pulse on or off, the state of qubits is swapped between entangled or idle modes. In either mode, the presence of stray couplings makes qubits accumulate coherent phase error. However, the error rates in the two modes differ because qubits carry different stray coupling strengths in each mode; therefore, eliminating stray coupling from one mode does not remove it from the other. We propose to combine such a gate with a tunable coupler and show that both idle and entangled qubits can become free from stray couplings. This significantly increases the operational switch fidelity in quantum algorithms. We further propose a weakly tunable qubit as an optimum coupler to bring the two modes parametrically near each other. This remarkably enhances the tuning process by reducing its leakage.

Quantum computation has demonstrated advantages over classical computation for special hard problems, where a set of universal quantum gates is essential. Geometric phases, which have built-in resilience to local noise, have been used to construct quantum gates with excellent performance. However, this advantage has been smeared in previous schemes. Here, we propose a state-independent nonadiabatic geometric quantum-gate scheme that is able to realize a more fully geometric gate than previous approaches, allowing for the cancelation of dynamical phases accumulated by an arbitrary state. Numerical simulations demonstrate that our scheme has significantly stronger gate robustness than the previous geometric and dynamical ones. Meanwhile, we give a detailed physical implementation of our scheme with the Rydberg atom system based on the Rydberg blockade effect, specifically for multiqubit control-phase gates, which exceeds the fault-tolerance threshold of multiqubit quantum gates within the considered error range. Therefore, our scheme provides a promising way for fault-tolerant quantum computation in atomic systems.

The variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) is a hybrid quantum classical algorithm designed for current and near-term quantum devices. Despite its initial success, there is a lack of understanding involving several of its key aspects. There are problems with VQE that forbid a favorable scaling towards quantum advantage. In order to alleviate the problems, we propose and extensively test a quantum annealing inspired heuristic that supplements VQE. The improved VQE enables an efficient initial state-preparation mechanism, in a recursive manner, for a quasidynamical unitary evolution. We conduct an in-depth scaling analysis of finding the ground-state energies with increasing lattice sizes of the Heisenberg model, employing simulations of up to 40 qubits that manipulate the complete state vector. In addition to systematically finding the ground-state energy, we observe that it avoids barren plateaus, escapes local minima, and works with low-depth circuits. For the current devices, we further propose a benchmarking toolkit using a mean-field model and test it on IBM Q devices. Realistic gate execution times estimate a longer computational time to complete the same computation on a fully functional error-free quantum computer than on a quantum computer emulator implemented on a classical computer. However, our proposal can be expected to help accurate estimations of the ground-state energies beyond 50 qubits when the complete state vector can no longer be stored on a classical computer, thus enabling quantum advantage.

Coherent coupling in magnon-based hybrid systems has many potential applications in quantum information processing. Magnons can propagate in magnetically ordered materials without any motion of electrons, offering a unique method to build low-power-consumption devices and information channels free of heat dissipation. In this paper, we demonstrate the coherent propagation of hybridized modes between spin waves and Love surface acoustic waves in a multiferroic ${\mathrm{Bi}\mathrm{Fe}\mathrm{O}}_3$ and ferromagnetic ${\mathrm{La}}_{0.67}{\mathrm{Sr}}_{0.33}{\mathrm{Mn}\mathrm{O}}_3$-based heterostructure. The magnetoelastic coupling enables a giant enhancement of the strength of the hybridized mode by a factor of 26 compared to that of the pure spin waves. A short wavelength down to 250 nm is demonstrated for the hybridized mode, which is desirable for nanoscale acoustomagnonic applications. Our combined experimental and theoretical analyses represent a step towards the coherent control in hybrid magnonics, which may inspire the study of magnon-phonon hybrid systems for coherent information processing and manipulation.

We present a hybrid quantum system composed of a magnetic vortex and a nanomechanical resonator. We show that the gyrotropic mode of the vortex can coherently couple to the quantized mechanical motion of the resonator through magnetic interaction. Benefiting from the topologically protected properties and the low damping of vortices, as well as the excellent coherent features of nanomechanical resonators, the proposed system can achieve strong coupling and even the ultrastrong-coupling regime by choosing appropriate parameters. In combination with other quantum systems, such as a nitrogen-vacancy (N-V) center, coherent state transfer between the vortex excitation and the spin can be realized. This setup provides a potential platform for quantum information processing and investigations into the ultrastrong-coupling regime and macroscopic quantum physics.

We introduce a simple widely applicable formalism for designing “error-divisible” two-qubit gates: a quantum gate set where fractional rotations have proportionally reduced error compared to the full entangling gate. In current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) algorithms, performance is largely constrained by error proliferation at high circuit depths, of which two-qubit gate error is generally the dominant contribution. Further, in many hardware implementations, arbitrary two-qubit rotations must be composed from multiple two-qubit stock gates, further increasing error. This work introduces a set of criteria, and example wave forms and protocols to satisfy them, using superconducting qubits with tunable couplers for constructing continuous gate sets with significantly reduced leakage and dynamic $ZZ$ errors for small-angle rotations. If implemented at scale, NISQ-algorithm performance could be significantly improved by our error-divisible gate protocols.

The design of fast algorithms for combinatorial optimization greatly contributes to a plethora of domains such as logistics, finance, and chemistry. Quantum approximate optimization algorithms (QAOAs), which utilize the power of quantum machines and inherit the spirit of adiabatic evolution, are approaches to tackle combinatorial problems with potential runtime speedups. However, hurdled by the limited quantum resources nowadays, QAOAs are infeasible to manipulate large-scale problems. To address this issue, here we revisit the MaxCut problem via the divide-and-conquer heuristic: seek the solutions of subgraphs in parallel and then merge these solutions to obtain the global solution. Because of the ${\mathbb{Z}}_2$ symmetry in MaxCut, we prove that the merging process can be further cast into a new MaxCut problem and thus be addressed by QAOAs or other MaxCut solvers. In view of this, we propose QAOA-in-QAOA (${\mathrm{QAOA}}^2$) to solve arbitrary large-scale MaxCut problems using small quantum machines. We also prove that the performance of ${\mathrm{QAOA}}^2$ is lower bounded with respect to the divide-and-conquer process. Experiment results illustrate that, under different graph settings, ${\mathrm{QAOA}}^2$ attains a competitive or even better performance over classical algorithms when the node count is around $2000$. Our method can be seamlessly embedded into other advanced strategies to enhance the capability of QAOAs in large-scale combinatorial optimization problems.

Quantum error correction will be an essential ingredient in realizing fault-tolerant quantum computing. However, most correction schemes rely on the assumption that errors are sufficiently uncorrelated in space and time. In superconducting qubits, this assumption is drastically violated in the presence of ionizing radiation, which creates bursts of high-energy phonons in the substrate. These phonons can break Cooper pairs in the superconductor and, thus, create quasiparticles over large areas, consequently reducing qubit coherence across the quantum device in a correlated fashion. A potential mitigation technique is to place large volumes of normal or superconducting metal on the device, capable of reducing the phonon energy to below the superconducting gap of the qubits. To investigate the effectiveness of this method, we fabricate a quantum device with four nominally identical nanowire-based transmon qubits. On the device, half of the niobium-titanium-nitride ground plane is replaced with aluminum ($\mathrm{Al}$), which has a significantly lower superconducting gap. We deterministically inject high-energy phonons into the substrate by voltage biasing a galvanically isolated Josephson junction. In the presence of the small-gap material, we find a factor of 2–5 less degradation in the injection-dependent qubit lifetimes and observe that the undesired excited qubit state population is mitigated by a similar factor. We furthermore turn the $\mathrm{Al}$ normal with a magnetic field, finding no change in the phonon protection. This suggests that the efficacy of the protection in our device is not limited by the size of the superconducting gap in the $\mathrm{Al}$ ground plane. Our results provide a promising foundation for protecting superconducting-qubit processors against correlated errors from ionizing radiation.

Dielectric loss is one of the major decoherence sources of superconducting qubits. Contemporary high-coherence superconducting qubits are formed by material systems mostly consisting of superconducting films on substrate with low dielectric loss, where the loss mainly originates from the surfaces and interfaces. Among the multiple candidates for material systems, a combination of titanium nitride ($\mathrm{Ti}\mathrm{N}$) film and sapphire substrate has good potential because of its chemical stability against oxidization and its high quality at interfaces. In this work, we report a $\mathrm{Ti}\mathrm{N}$ film deposited onto sapphire substrate achieving low dielectric loss at the material interface. Through the systematic characterizations of a series of transmon qubits fabricated with identical batches of $\mathrm{Ti}\mathrm{N}$ base layers but different geometries of qubit shunting capacitors with various participation ratios of the material interface, we quantitatively extract the loss-tangent value at the substrate-metal interface, which is smaller than $8.9\times {10}^{-4}$ in a 1-nm disordered layer, and a limiting quality factor of about 7.3 million. By optimizing the interface participation ratio of the two-dimensional (2D) transmon qubit, we reproducibly achieve a quality factor of 5.7 million on average. The best 2D qubits show lifetimes of up to $300\mu \mathrm{s}$ and quality factors achieving 8.1 million. We demonstrate that $\mathrm{Ti}\mathrm{N}$ film on sapphire substrate is an ideal material system for high-coherence superconducting qubits. Our analyses further suggest that the interface dielectric loss around the Josephson-junction part of the circuit could be the dominant limitation of lifetimes for state-of-the-art transmon qubits.

We propose a method based on deep reinforcement learning that efficiently prepares a quantum many-body pure state in thermal or prethermal equilibrium. The main physical intuition underlying the method is that the information on the equilibrium states can be efficiently encoded and/or extracted by focusing on only a few local observables, relying on the typicality of equilibrium states. Instead of resorting to the expensive preparation protocol that adopts global features such as the quantum state fidelity, we show that the equilibrium states can be efficiently prepared only by learning the expectation values of local observables. We demonstrate our method by preparing two illustrative examples: Gibbs ensembles in nonintegrable systems and generalized Gibbs ensembles in integrable systems. Pure states prepared solely from local observables are numerically shown to successfully encode the macroscopic properties of the equilibrium states. Furthermore, we find that the preparation errors, with respect to the system size, decay exponentially for Gibbs ensembles and polynomially for generalized Gibbs ensembles, which is in agreement with the finite-size fluctuation within thermodynamic ensembles. Our method paves a path toward studying the thermodynamic and statistical properties of quantum many-body systems in quantum hardware.

We perform noise spectroscopy of a Josephson parametric oscillator (JPO) by implementing a microwave homodyne interferometric measurement scheme. We observe the fluctuations in the self-oscillating output field of the JPO for a long 10-s time interval in a single-shot measurement and characterize the phase and amplitude noise. Furthermore, we investigate the effects of the pump strength on the output noise power spectra of the JPO. We find strong fluctuations in the phase with a $1/f^2$ characteristic in the phase noise power spectrum, which are suppressed by increasing the pump strength.

Utilizing dispersive gate sensing (DGS), we investigate the spin-orbit field (${\mathbf{B}}_{\mathrm{SO}}$) orientation in a many-electron double quantum dot (DQD) defined in an $\mathrm{In}\mathrm{Sb}$ nanowire. While characterizing the interdot tunnel couplings, we find the measured dispersive signal depends on the electron-charge occupancy, as well as on the amplitude and orientation of the external magnetic field. The dispersive signal is mostly insensitive to the external field orientation when a DQD is occupied by a total odd number of electrons. For a DQD occupied by a total even number of electrons, the dispersive signal is reduced when the finite external magnetic field aligns with the effective ${\mathbf{B}}_{\mathrm{SO}}$ orientation. This fact enables the identification of ${\mathbf{B}}_{\mathrm{SO}}$ orientations for different DQD electron occupancies. The ${\mathbf{B}}_{\mathrm{SO}}$ orientation varies drastically between charge transitions, and is generally neither perpendicular to the nanowire nor in the chip plane. Moreover, ${\mathbf{B}}_{\mathrm{SO}}$ is similar for pairs of transitions involving the same valence orbital, and varies between such pairs. Our work demonstrates the practicality of DGS in characterizing spin-orbit interactions in quantum dot systems, without requiring any current flow through the device.

We introduce a quantum control protocol that produces smooth, experimentally implementable control sequences optimized to combat temporally correlated noise for single-qubit systems. The control ansatz is specifically chosen to be a functional expansion of discrete prolate spheroidal sequences, a discrete time basis known to be optimally concentrated in time and frequency, and quite attractive when faced with experimental control hardware constraints. We leverage the filter function formalism to transform the control problem into a filter design problem, and show that the frequency response of a quantum system can be carefully tailored to avoid the most relevant dynamical contributions of noise processes. Using gradient ascent, we obtain optimized filter functions and exploit them to elucidate important details about the relationship between filter function design, control bandwidth, and noise characteristics. In particular, we identify regimes of optimal noise suppression and, in turn, optimal control bandwidth directly proportional to the size of the frequency bands where the noise power is large. In addition to providing guiding principles for filter design, our approach enables the development of controls that simultaneously yield robust noise filtering and high-fidelity single-qubit logic operations in a wide variety of complex noise environments.

We introduce a fast and highly efficient physically realizable bit swap. Employing readily available and scalable Josephson junction microtechnology, the design implements the recently introduced paradigm of momentum computing. Its nanosecond speeds and sub-Landauer thermodynamic efficiency arise from dynamically storing memory in momentum degrees of freedom. As such, during the swap, the microstate distribution is never near equilibrium and the memory-state dynamics fall far outside of stochastic thermodynamics that assumes detailed-balanced Markovian dynamics. The device implements a bit-swap operation—a fundamental operation necessary to build reversible universal computing. Extensive, physically calibrated simulations demonstrate that device performance is robust and that momentum computing can support thermodynamically efficient, high-speed, large-scale general-purpose computing that circumvents Landauer’s bound.