Speaker
Description
Quantum processors are carefully designed under models that involve certains approximations and are later translated into solid state fabrication steps with their own limitations. Therefore the parameters of a (superconducting) transmon qubits will deviate from the ideal design and require individual characterization (e.g. qubit excitation frequency, associated resonator frequency, coherence time, dephasing time, etc.). Beside that, the complex circuit quantum electrodynamics between the components of the superconducting chip make necessary to calibrate the operations (quantum gates) and measurements that are applied to the qubits through engineered microwave pulses, including individual pulse tune-up for each qubit.
The characterization and calibration of the current state of the art transmon based quantum processors are executed mostly "manually" or "semi-automatically" by the experimentalists. With the scaling up of the number of qubits the manual approach would slow down the research and development of the quantum processors. Furthermore, in the long run such procedures will not be viable at all for a large scale quantum computer. Therefore, it is of high value to be automated. It will tackle as well the need of recurrent calibrations, that can arise due to slight variations of the experiment conditions, or even device aging.
Next, with a fully characterised and calibrated processor, follows a natural step on the roadmap of a fault tolerant quantum computer: to demonstrate an error correction capability of the current processor.
The specific goals of this project are to automate the characterisation of a 7-qubit quantum processor and the calibration of high-fidelity operations (two-qubit gates in particular) and measurements on it; and, time permitting, demonstrate a quantum error correcting code on the processor.
