While operating a quantum random-number generator (QRNG), it is extremely useful to have a model of the physical entropy source to guarantee that the device is delivering randomness of genuine quantum origin. In this work we consider a QRNG based on a gain-switched laser diode and we develop a model to quantify its phase noise. This model is based on the laser rate equations and the state-of-the-art techniques for the characterization of laser diodes used in lightwave systems. These tools let us achieve a faithful modeling of the phase noise and we verify its accuracy through comparisons with experimental measurements. Furthermore, the model can be used to select optimal parameters to maximize the QRNG performance and monitor the device behavior to detect malfunctioning or malicious tampering of the device.

In this work, we briefly overview various options for Josephson junctions, which should be scalable down to nanometer range for utilization in nanoscale digital superconducting technology. Such junctions should possess high values of critical current, $I_c$, and normal state resistance, $R_N$. Another requirement is the high reproducibility of the junction parameters across a wafer in a fabrication process. We argue that superconductor-normal metal-superconductor ($SN$-$N$-$NS$) Josephson junction of “variable thickness bridge” geometry is a promising choice to meet these requirements. Theoretical analysis of the $SN$-$N$-$NS$ junction is performed in the case where the distance between the $S$ electrodes is comparable to the coherence length of the $N$ material. The restriction on the junction geometrical parameters providing the existence of superconductivity in the $S$ electrodes is derived for the current flowing through the junction of an order of $I_c$. The junction heating, as well as available mechanisms for the heat removal, is analyzed. The obtained results show that a $SN$-$N$-$NS$ junction with a high (submillivolt) value of $I_c{R}_N$ product can be fabricated from a broadly utilized combination of materials like Nb/Cu using well-established technological processes. The junction area can be scaled down to that of semiconductor transistors fabricated in the frame of a 40-nm process.

Inference is the task of drawing conclusions about unobserved variables given observations of related variables. Applications range from identifying diseases from symptoms to classifying economic regimes from price movements. Unfortunately, performing exact inference is intractable in general. One alternative is variational inference, where a candidate probability distribution is optimized to approximate the posterior distribution over unobserved variables. For good approximations, a flexible and highly expressive candidate distribution is desirable. In this work, we use quantum Born machines as variational distributions over discrete variables. We apply the framework of operator variational inference to achieve this goal. In particular, we adopt two specific realizations: one with an adversarial objective and one based on the kernelized Stein discrepancy. We demonstrate the approach numerically using examples of Bayesian networks, and implement an experiment on an IBM quantum computer. Our techniques enable efficient variational inference with distributions beyond those that are efficiently representable on a classical computer.

Microwave delivery to samples in a cryogenic environment can pose experimental challenges such as restricting optical access, space constraints, and heat generation. Moreover, existing solutions that overcome various experimental restrictions do not necessarily provide a large homogeneous oscillating magnetic field over macroscopic length scales, which is required for control of spin ensembles or fast gate operations in scaled-up quantum computing implementations. Here, we show fast and coherent control of a negatively charged nitrogen-vacancy spin ensemble by taking advantage of the high permittivity of a ${\mathrm{K}\mathrm{Ta}\mathrm{O}}_3$ dielectric resonator at cryogenic temperatures. We achieve Rabi frequencies of up to 48 MHz, with a total power-to-field conversion factor $C_{\mathrm{P}}=9.66\mathrm{mT}/\sqrt{\mathrm{W}}$ (approximately $191{\mathrm{MHz}}_{\mathrm{Rabi}}/\sqrt{\mathrm{W}}$). We use the nitrogen-vacancy-center spin ensemble to probe the quality factor, the coherent enhancement, and the spatial distribution of the magnetic field inside the diamond sample. The key advantages of the dielectric resonator utilized in this work are ease of assembly, in situ tunability, a high magnetic field conversion efficiency, a low-volume footprint, and optical transparency. This makes ${\mathrm{K}\mathrm{Ta}\mathrm{O}}_3$ dielectric resonators a promising platform for the delivery of microwave fields for the control of spins in various materials at cryogenic temperatures.

We report on a robust method to achieve strong coupling between a superconducting flux qubit and a high-quality quarter-wavelength coplanar waveguide resonator. We demonstrate the progression from the strong to ultrastrong coupling regime by varying the length of a shared inductive coupling element, ultimately achieving a qubit-resonator coupling strength of 655 MHz, $10\mathrm{\%}$ of the resonator frequency. We derive an analytical expression for the coupling strength in terms of circuit parameters and also discuss the maximum achievable coupling within this framework. We experimentally characterize flux qubits coupled to superconducting resonators using one- and two-tone spectroscopy methods, demonstrating excellent agreement with the proposed theoretical model.

With the increasing size of quantum processors, submodules that constitute the processor hardware will become too large to accurately simulate on a classical computer. Therefore, one would soon have to fabricate and test each new design primitive and parameter choice in time-consuming coordination between design, fabrication, and experimental validation. Here we show how one can design and test the performance of next-generation quantum hardware—by using existing quantum computers. Focusing on superconducting transmon processors as a prominent hardware platform, we compute the static and dynamic properties of individual and coupled transmons. We show how the energy spectra of transmons can be obtained by variational hybrid quantum-classical algorithms that are well suited for near-term noisy quantum computers. In addition, single- and two-qubit gate simulations are demonstrated via Suzuki-Trotter decomposition. Our methods pave a promising way towards designing candidate quantum processors when the demands of calculating submodule properties exceed the capabilities of classical computing resources.

Neuroevolution, a field that draws inspiration from the evolution of brains in nature, harnesses evolutionary algorithms to construct artificial neural networks. It bears a number of intriguing capabilities that are typically inaccessible to gradient-based approaches, including optimizing neural-network architectures, hyperparameters, and even learning the training rules. In this paper, we introduce a quantum neuroevolution algorithm that autonomously finds near-optimal quantum neural networks for different machine-learning tasks. In particular, we establish a one-to-one mapping between quantum circuits and directed graphs, and reduce the problem of finding the appropriate gate sequences to a task of searching suitable paths in the corresponding graph as a Markovian process. We benchmark the effectiveness of the introduced algorithm through concrete examples including classifications of real-life images and symmetry-protected topological states. Our results showcase the vast potential of neuroevolution algorithms in quantum architecture search, which would boost the exploration towards quantum-learning advantage with noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices.

Temporal, spectral, and sample-to-sample fluctuations in coherence properties of qubits form an outstanding challenge for the development of upscaled fault-tolerant quantum computers. A ubiquitous source for these fluctuations in superconducting qubits is a set of atomic scale defects with a two-level structure. Here we propose a way to mitigate these fluctuations and stabilize the qubit performance. We show that frequency modulation of a qubit or, alternatively, of the two-level defects, leads to averaging of the qubit relaxation rate over a wide interval of frequencies.

We propose a fast mixed-state control scheme to transfer the quantum state along designable trajectories in Hilbert space, which is robust to multiple decoherence noises. Starting with the dynamical invariants of open quantum systems, we present the shortcuts to adiabaticity (STA) of open quantum systems at first, then apply the STA to speed up the adiabatic steady process. Our scheme drives open systems from a initial steady state to a target steady state by a controlled Liouvillian that possesses the same form as the reference (original) one that is accessible in present-day experiments. An experimental design with currently available parameters for the nitrogen-vacancy (N-$V$) center in diamond is suggested and discussed.

A transducer of single photons between microwave and optical frequencies can be used to realize quantum communication over optical fiber links between distant superconducting quantum computers. A promising scalable approach to constructing such a transducer is to use ensembles of quantum emitters interacting simultaneously with electromagnetic fields at optical and microwave frequencies. However, inhomogeneous broadening in the transition frequencies of the emitters can be detrimental to this collective action. In this paper, we utilize a gradient-based optimization strategy to design the temporal shape of the laser field driving the transduction system to mitigate the effects of inhomogeneous broadening. We study the improvement of transduction efficiencies as a function of inhomogeneous broadening in different single-emitter cooperativity regimes and correlate it with a restoration of super-radiance effects in the emitter ensembles. Furthermore, to assess the optimality of our pulse designs, we provide certifiable bounds on the design problem and compare them to the achieved performance.

We present a superconductor-semiconductor materials system that is both scalable and monolithically integrated on a silicon substrate. It uses selective-area growth of $\mathrm{Al}$-$\mathrm{In}\mathrm{As}$ hybrid structures on a planar III-V buffer layer, grown directly on a high-resistivity silicon substrate. We characterize the electrical properties of this materials system at millikelvin temperatures and observe a high average field-effect mobility of $\mu \approx 3200{\mathrm{cm}}^2\mathrm{/Vs}$ for the $\mathrm{In}\mathrm{As}$ channel and a hard induced superconducting gap. Josephson junctions exhibit a high interface transmission, $\mathcal{T}\approx 0.75$, a gate-voltage-tunable switching current with a product of critical current and normal state resistance, $I_C{R}_N\approx 83\mu \mathrm{V}$, and signatures of multiple Andreev reflections. These results pave the way for scalable and high-coherence gate-voltage-tunable transmon devices and other superconductor-semiconductor hybrids fabricated directly on silicon.

The key for realizing fault-tolerant quantum computation lies in maintaining the coherence of all qubits so that high-fidelity and robust quantum manipulations on them can be achieved. One of the promising approaches is to use geometric phases in the construction of universal quantum gates, due to their intrinsic robustness against certain types of local noise. However, due to limitations in previous implementations, the noise-resilience feature of nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation (NHQC) still needs to be improved. Here, in combination with the dynamical-correction technique, we propose a general protocol of universal NHQC with simplified control, which can greatly suppress the effect of the accompanied X errors, retaining the main merit of geometric quantum operations. Numerical simulation shows that the performance of our gate can be much better than that of previous protocols. Remarkably, when incorporating a decoherence-free subspace encoding for the collective dephasing noise, our scheme can also be robust against the involved Z errors. In addition, we also outline the physical implementation of the protocol, which is insensitive to both X and Z errors. Therefore, our protocol provides a promising strategy for scalable fault-tolerant quantum computation.

Quantum computation based on geometric phase is generally believed to be more robust against certain errors or noises than the conventional dynamical strategy. However, the gate error caused by the decoherence effect is inevitable, and thus faster gate operations are highly desired. Here, we propose a nonadiabatic holonomic quantum-computation (NHQC) scheme with detuned interactions on a $\mathrm{\Delta }$-type three-level system, which combines the time-optimal control technique with the time-independent detuning adjustment to further accelerate universal gate operations, so that the gate time can be greatly shortened within the hardware limitation, and thus high-fidelity gates can be obtained. Meanwhile, our numerical simulations show that the gate robustness is also stronger than previous schemes. Finally, we present an implementation of our proposal on superconducting quantum circuits, with a decoherence-free subspace encoding, based on the experimentally demonstrated parametrically tunable coupling technique, which simplifies previous investigations. Therefore, our protocol provides a more promising alternative for future fault-tolerant quantum computation.

A combination of digitized shortcut to adiabaticity (STA) and sequential digitized adiabaticity is implemented in a superconducting quantum device to determine the electronic states in two example systems, the ${\mathrm{H}}_2$ molecule and the topological Bernevig-Hughes-Zhang (BHZ) model. For ${\mathrm{H}}_2$, a short internuclear distance is chosen as a starting point, at which the ground and excited states are obtained via digitized STA. From this starting point, a sequence of internuclear distances is built. The eigenstates at each distance are sequentially determined from those at the previous distance via the digitized adiabaticity, leading to the potential energy landscapes of ${\mathrm{H}}_2$. The same approach is applied to the BHZ model and the valence and conduction bands are obtained with a high degree of accuracy along the $X$-$\mathrm{\Gamma }$-$X$ line cut of the first Brillouin zone. Furthermore, a numerical simulation of this method is performed to successfully extract the ground states of hydrogen chains with lengths of between three and six atoms.

We present a scheme to generate continuous-variable bipartite entanglement between two optical modes in a hybrid optical-microwave-plasmonic graphene waveguide system. In this scheme, we exploit the interaction of two light fields coupled to the same microwave mode via plasmonic graphene waveguide to generate two-mode squeezing, which can be used for continuous-variable quantum teleportation of the light signals over large distances. Furthermore, we study the teleportation fidelity of an unknown coherent state. The teleportation protocol is robust against the thermal noise associated with the microwave degree of freedom.

We study a quantum system composed of three interacting qubits, each coupled to a different thermal reservoir. We show how to engineer it to build a quantum device analogous to an electronic bipolar transistor. We outline how the interaction among the qubits plays a crucial role for the appearance of the effect, also linking it to the characteristics of system-bath interactions that govern the decoherence and dissipation mechanisms of the system. By comparison with previous proposals, our model extends the regime of parameters where the transistor effect occurs, the effect being more robust with respect to small variations of the coupling parameters. Moreover, our model appears to be more realistic and directly connected in terms of potential implementations to feasible setups in the domain of quantum spin chains, such as molecular nanomagnets.