Nonreciprocity and Circulation in a Passive Josephson-Junction Ring.

Building large-scale superconducting quantum circuits will require miniaturization and integration of supporting devices including microwave circulators, which are currently bulky, stand-alone components. Here, we report the measurement of microwave scattering from a ring of Josephson junctions, with dc-only control fields. We detect the effect of quasiparticle tunneling, and dynamically classify the system at its operating design point into different quasiparticle sectors. We optimize the device within one of the quasiparticle sectors, where we observe an unambiguous signature of nonreciprocal 3-port scattering within that sector. This enables operation as a circulator, and at the optimal circulation point, we observe on-resonance insertion loss of 2 dB, isolation of 14 dB, power reflectance of -11 dB, and a bandwidth of 200 MHz, averaged over the 3 input ports.

Passive Superconducting Circulator on a Chip.

An on-chip microwave circulator that is compatible with superconducting devices is a key element for scale up of superconducting circuits. Previous approaches to integrating circulators on chip involve either external driving that requires extra microwave lines or a strong magnetic field that would compromise superconductivity. Here we report the first proof-of-principle realization of a passive on-chip circulator that is made from a superconducting loop interrupted by three notionally identical Josephson junctions and is tuned with only dc control fields. Our experimental results show evidence for nonreciprocal scattering, and excellent agreement with theoretical simulations. We also present a detailed analysis of quasiparticle tunneling in our device using a hidden Markov model. By reducing the junction asymmetry and utilizing the known methods of protection from quasiparticles, we anticipate that Josephson-loop circulator will become ubiquitous in superconducting circuits.

Measuring Effective Temperatures of Qubits Using Correlations.

Initialization of a qubit in a pure state is a prerequisite for quantum computer operation. A plethora of ways to achieve this has been proposed in the last decade, from active reset protocols to advances in materials and shielding. An instrumental tool to evaluate those methods and develop new ones is the ability to measure the population of excited states with high precision and in a short period of time. In this Letter, we propose a new technique of finding the excited state population of a qubit using correlations between two sequential measurements. We experimentally implement the proposed technique using a circuit QED platform and compare its performance with previously developed ones. Unlike other techniques, our method does not require high-fidelity readout and does not involve the excited levels of the system outside of the qubit subspace. We experimentally demonstrated measurement of the spurious qubit population with accuracy of up to 0.01%. This accuracy enabled us to perform "temperature spectroscopy" of the qubit, which helps to shed light on decoherence sources.