Reducing the impact of radioactivity on quantum circuits in a deep-underground facility
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As quantum coherence times of superconducting circuits have increased from nanoseconds to hundreds of microseconds, they are currently one of the leading platforms for quantum information processing. However, coherence needs to further improve by orders of magnitude to reduce the prohibitive hardware overhead of current error correction schemes. Reaching this goal hinges on reducing the density of broken Cooper pairs, so-called quasiparticles. Here, we show that environmental radioactivity is a significant source of nonequilibrium quasiparticles. Moreover, ionizing radiation introduces time-correlated quasiparticle bursts in resonators on the same chip, further complicating quantum error correction. Operating in a deep-underground lead-shielded cryostat decreases the quasiparticle burst rate by a factor thirty and reduces dissipation up to a factor four, showcasing the importance of radiation abatement in future solid-state quantum hardware.
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The typical energy for an electron-hole pair is 3.75 eV.
“The typical energy for an electron-hole pair is E e-h = 3 : 75eV [3]”
From Resolving catastrophic error bursts from cosmic rays in large arrays of superconducting qubits (2022) · cites this paper as [3]
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- Authors
- Cardani, L., Valenti, F., Casali, N., Catelani, G., Charpentier, T., Clemenza, M., Colantoni, I., Cruciani, A., D’Imperio, G., Gironi, L., Grünhaupt, L., Gusenkova, D., Henriques, F., Lagoin, M., Martinez, M., Pettinari, G., Rusconi, C., Sander, O., Tomei, C., Ustinov, A. V., Weber, M., Wernsdorfer, W., Vignati, M., Pirro, S., & Pop, I. M.
- Affiliations
- Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Roma I (IT)
- Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (DE)
- Forschungszentrum Jülich (DE)
- Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Milano (IT)
- National Research Council (IT)
- Universidad de Zaragoza (ES)
- University of South Carolina (US)
- Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (IT)
- Corresponding author
- Cardani, L.
- Pop, I. M.
- ORCID
- Venue
- Nature Communications
- Published
- 2021-05-12
- Volume
- 12
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 2733-2733
- ISSN
- 2041-1723 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC8115287
- OpenAlex
- W3021797384
- Cited by
- 163
- References
- 44
- Citations by year
- 2026: 17 · 2025: 25 · 2024: 33 · 2023: 40 · 2022: 28 · 2021: 17 · 2020: 3
- FWCI
- 10.42
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Locations
- Nature Communications (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- IRIS Research product catalog (Sapienza University of Rome) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- HAL (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- BOA (University of Milano-Bicocca) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Zaguan (University of Zaragoza Repository) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Funders
- Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung
- Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung
- Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso
- FP7 Ideas: European Research Council (335359)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Quantum Information and Cryptography
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Astronomy and Astrophysics › Superconducting and THz Device Technology
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Quantum Computing Algorithms and Architecture
- Keywords
- environmental radioactivity, quasiparticles, superconducting quantum circuits, quantum coherence, ionizing radiation, lead shielding, cryostat, energy dissipation, quantum error correction, nonequilibrium quasiparticles
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