An engineering guide to superconducting quantum circuit shielding

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive practical guide on shielding and filtering techniques essential for protecting superconducting quantum circuits from electromagnetic and infrared noise, crucial for advancing large-scale quantum computing.

Contribution

It offers a detailed review of shielding design, materials, filtering methods, and evaluation techniques, with recommendations for scalable protection systems in superconducting quantum processors.

Findings

Effective multilayer shielding reduces electromagnetic interference.

Optimized microwave filtering improves qubit coherence.

Shielding strategies are essential for large-scale quantum systems.

Abstract

In this review, we provide a practical guide on protection of superconducting quantum circuits from broadband electromagnetic and infrared-radiation noise by using cryogenic shielding and filtering of microwave lines. Recently, superconducting multi-qubit processors demonstrated quantum supremacy and quantum error correction below the surface code threshold. However, the decoherence-induced loss of quantum information still remains a challenge for more than 100 qubit quantum computing. Here, we review the key aspects of superconducting quantum circuits protection from stray electromagnetic fields and infrared radiation, namely, multilayer shielding design, materials, filtering of the fridge lines and attenuation, cryogenic setup configurations, and methods for shielding efficiency evaluation developed over the last 10 years. In summary, we make recommendations for creation of an efficient and compact shielding system as well as microwave filtering for a large-scale superconducting quantum systems.