Dresden 2026 – scientific programme

Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Updates | Downloads | Help

QI: Fachverband Quanteninformation

QI 6: Implementations II

QI 6.10: Talk

Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 12:30–12:45, BEY/0245

Characterization of driven unwanted state transitions in superconducting circuits — •Sumeru Hazra, Wei Dai, Daniel. K. Weiss, Pavel D. Kurilovich, Thomas Connolly, Harsh K. Babla, Shraddha Singh, Vidul R. Joshi, Andy Z. Ding, Pranav D. Parakh, Jaya Venkatraman, Xu Xiao, Luigi Frunzio, and Michel H. Devoret — Department of Applied Physics, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

Microwave drives are essential for the control and readout of superconducting quantum circuits. Ideally, strong drive increases the speed and fidelity of such operations, however, in practice, strong drives also induce unwanted state transitions that corrupt these operations. In this talk, I will present a comprehensive investigation of drive-induced transitions in a fixed-frequency qubit subjected to microwave tones over a broad 9 GHz range. By combining a pump-probe spectroscopy with driven Hamiltonian simulations, we identify the physical origins of these transitions and group them into three mechanisms: (i) Resonant interactions with parasitic two-level systems activated by drive-induced ac-Stark shifts, (ii) Intrinsic multi-photon transitions out of the computational subspace, and (iii) Inelastic scattering processes where the qubit exchanges energy with spurious electromagnetic modes or TLS defects. I will show that Floquet steady-state simulations, supplemented with finite-element electromagnetic modeling, accurately predict all transitions that do not involve TLSs. These results establish a unified framework for predicting and eliminating drive-induced unwanted transitions.

Keywords: Readout; Strongly driven circuits; Parametric drives; Readout induced leakage; Quantum gates