Observation of a Strongly Enhanced Relaxation Time of an In-situ Tunable Transmon on a Silicon Substrate up to the Purcell Limit Approaching 100 μs

Abstract

The remarkable advances of quantum computation technology with superconducting qubits based on circuit quantum electrodynamics (QED) architecture have been achieved by improving control, protection and measurement of the quantum states at the same time. At the heart of all these quantum operations, the significant enhancement of the qubit coherence time during the last decades was the key. Even after all these advances, the coherence and relaxation time of superconducting qubits still requires further improvements toward fault-tolerant quantum computation. Here, we report our observation of a strongly enhanced lifetime of an in-situ tunable superconducting transmon qubit on a silicon substrate that is embedded in a three-dimensional copper cavity. We measured a lifetime of the qubit of up to 84 µs, which is the best reported value of an in-situ tunable transmon on a silicon substrate. In our experiment, the in-situ frequency tunability over a broad range enabled the Purcell factor to be controlled continuously by detuning the qubit frequency against the resonator frequency in the strong dispersive regime. The silicon substrate has its own importance because the substrate should be fully compatible with the conventional semiconductor processes so that scalability and multi-chip module capability are guaranteed. In order to control the Purcell factor with another parameter, we displaced the qubit position in the cavity and observed a longer relaxation time with a smaller coupling coefficient. We believe that this systematic study and the control technique of the Purcell effect in the circuit QED design, together with minimizing the microwave photon loss through an improvement of the fabrication, will contribute to the realization of a practical large-scale quantum computer based on superconducting qubit technology.