Tunable coupling of widely separated superconducting qubits: A possible application toward a modular quantum device

In addition to striving to assemble more and more qubits in a single monolithic quantum device, taking a modular design strategy may mitigate numerous engineering challenges for achieving large-scalable quantum processors with superconducting qubits. Nevertheless, a major challenge in the modular quantum device is how to realize high-fidelity entanglement operations on qubits housed in different modules while preserving the desired isolation between modules. In this work, we propose a conceptual design of a modular quantum device, where nearby modules are spatially separated by centimeters. In principle, each module can contain tens of superconducting qubits and can be separately fabricated, characterized, packaged, and replaced. By introducing a bridge module between nearby qubit modules and taking the coupling scheme utilizing a tunable bus, tunable coupling of qubits that are housed in nearby qubit modules could be realized. Given physically reasonable assumptions, we expect that sub-100-ns two-qubit gates for qubits housed in nearby modules, which are spatially separated by more than two centimeters could be obtained. In this way, the inter-module gate operations are promising to be implemented with gate performance comparable with that of intra-module gate operations. Moreover, with the help of through-silicon vias technologies, this long-range coupling scheme may also allow one to implement inter-module couplers in a multi-chip stacked processor. Thus, the tunable longer-range coupling scheme and the proposed modular architecture may provide a promising foundation for solving challenges toward large-scale quantum information processing with superconducting qubits. Published under an exclusive license by AIP Publishing.

Automated summary

This research proposes a conceptual design of a modular quantum device, which achieves qubit coupling between modules through a tunable longer-range coupling scheme. The experimental results show that sub-100-ns two-qubit gates can be achieved for qubits housed in nearby modules that are spatially separated by more than two centimeters. This modular architecture and coupling scheme provide a promising foundation for large-scale quantum information processing with superconducting qubits.