Tunable three-body coupler for superconducting flux qubits

TL;DR

This paper introduces a superconducting device capable of implementing strong, tunable three-body interactions with minimal two-body interactions, enhancing quantum annealing and many-body quantum simulations.

Contribution

It presents a novel superconducting circuit design that achieves tunable three-body couplings with noise robustness, verified through theoretical models and simulations.

Findings

The device exhibits strong three-body interactions with negligible two-body couplings.

The circuit demonstrates robustness against noise and parameter variations.

Simulations confirm its effectiveness in quantum annealing applications.

Abstract

The implementation of many-body interactions is relevant in various areas of quantum information. We present a superconducting device that implements a strong and tunable three-body interaction between superconducting quantum bits, with vanishing two-body interactions and robustness against noise and circuit parameter variations. These properties are confirmed by calculations based on the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, a two-level model for the coupling circuit, and numerical diagonalization. This circuit behaves as an ideal computational basis ZZZ coupler in a simulated three-qubit quantum annealing experiment. This work will be relevant for advanced quantum annealing protocols and future developments of high-order many-body interactions in quantum computers and simulators.