Continuous-variable geometric phase and its manipulation for quantum computation in a superconducting circuit

Geometric phase, associated with holonomy transformation in quantum state space, is an important quantum-mechanical effect. Besides fundamental interest, this effect has practical applications, among which geometric quantum computation is a paradigm, where quantum logic operations are realized through geometric phase manipulation that has some intrinsic noise-resilient advantages and may enable simplified implementation of multi-qubit gates compared to the dynamical approach. Here we report observation of a continuous-variable geometric phase and demonstrate a quantum gate protocol based on this phase in a superconducting circuit, where five qubits are controllably coupled to a resonator. Our geometric approach allows for one-step implementation of n-qubit controlled-phase gates, which represents a remarkable advantage compared to gate decomposition methods, where the number of required steps dramatically increases with n. Following this approach, we realize these gates with n up to 4, verifying the high efficiency of this geometric manipulation for quantum computation.