Laser annealing transmon qubits for high-performance superconducting quantum processors

Quantum physicists aim to scale the number of qubits during quantum computing, while maintaining high-fidelity quantum gates; this is a challenging task due to the precise frequency requirements that accompany the process. Superconducting quantum processors with more than 50 qubits are currently actively available and these fixed frequency transmons are attractive due to their long coherence and noise immunity. A transmon is a type of a superconducting charge qubit designed to have reduced sensitivity to charge noise. In a new report now published in Science Advances, Eric J. Zhang and a team of scientists at IBM Quantum, IBM T.J. Watson Research Centre, New York, U.S., used laser annealing to selectively tune transmon qubits into the desired frequency patterns. The research team achieved a tuning precision of 18.5 MHz, without any measurable impact on quantum coherence, and envision facilitating selective annealing in this way to play a central role in fixed-frequency architectures.