Superconducting circuit quantum computing with nanomechanical resonators as storage

TL;DR

This paper explores a superconducting transmon circuit architecture that uses nanomechanical resonators for quantum information storage, offering advantages in hardware simplicity, long coherence times, and increased quantum computational capacity.

Contribution

It introduces a hybrid nanomechanical architecture for quantum computing that outperforms traditional electromagnetic storage methods in quantum volume.

Findings

Nanomechanical resonators have longer lifetimes and smaller sizes than electromagnetic resonators.

Optimal coupling rates depend on the number of mechanical resonators.

The proposed architecture achieves higher quantum volume than electromagnetic approaches.

Abstract

We analyze the quantum information processing capability of a superconducting transmon circuit used to mediate interactions between quantum information stored in a collection of phononic crystal cavity resonators. Having only a single processing element to be controlled externally makes this approach significantly less hardware-intensive than traditional architectures with individual control of each qubit. Moreover, when compared with the commonly considered alternative approach using coplanar waveguide or 3d cavity microwave resonators for storage, the nanomechanical resonators offer both very long lifetime and small size -- two conflicting requirements for microwave resonators. A detailed gate error analysis leads to an optimal value for the qubit-resonator coupling rate as a function of the number of mechanical resonators in the system. For a given set of system parameters, a specific amount of coupling and number of resonators is found to optimize the quantum volume, an approximate measure for the computational capacity of a system. We see this volume is higher in the proposed hybrid nanomechanical architecture than in the competing on-chip electromagnetic approach.