In-situ tunable environment for superconducting qubits

Superconducting quantum circuits hold great potential in providing revolutionizing practical applications such as quantum sensing or computing. However, in many cases noise limits the operation and the fidelity of these circuits. Here we introduce a concept that exploits noise instead of trying to reduce it. Our concept uses photon-assisted single-electron tunneling as a controlled source for dissipation in superconducting qubits. We show how the recently developed quantum-circuit refrigerator [1], QCR, is suitable to control the dynamics of superconducting qubits. In our experiments, the QCR works as a voltage-controlled environmental bath for the qubit. The qubit-bath coupling strength can be tuned over several orders of magnitude on a nanosecond timescale. Such a tunable environment is promising for fast qubit reset and studies of dissipative open quantum circuits. Our highly integrable circuit architecture may prove useful in the initialization of qubit arrays and in dissipation-assisted quantum annealing.

[1] K. Y. Tan, et al., Nature Commun. 8, 15189 (2017)