Quantum Technology User Meeting 2024

A day full of learning, insight, and discussion is behind us, and we’re thankful to all the participants and presenters for making the 4th Quantum Technology User Meeting a success! The goal of this meeting was to spark fruitful exchanges and foster community collaboration on scientific topics, but also regarding methods and tools that enable great research results.

This year we welcomed our guests to our home location in Zurich. Switzerland hosts some of the leading quantum technology research centers, and is, at the same time, strongly connected with other European quantum tech hubs - Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, or the UK, for example - as witnessed by the international crowd that gathered at this event. For a worldwide audience, the program was made available through a streaming service, and we’ve made some of the recordings available for you to revisit here.

This year’s program focused on superconducting and hybrid qubit technologies targeted at quantum computing applications and covered the full breadth of research topics, from exploratory novel qubit designs to scale-up challenges in leading technologies.

The day started off with a welcome address by our CEO, Sadik Hafizovic, who highlighted some of our customers' recent success stories in quantum technologies. It’s been 10 years since the start of our company’s journey in quantum technologies. Chip sizes are 100 times larger today and, all along, it’s been crucial to be in touch with the community and tackle research challenges together, often in close collaboration projects.

Let’s revisit some of the highlights of the scientific program!

Superconducting Qubit Research

Superconducting transmons are the qubits of choice in many successful quantum computing programs. But there are other promising device types being explored, as shown impressively in the first talk by Dr. Ray Mencia from the Superconductor Quantum Information Laboratory at EPFL. He introduced the physics of the fluxonium qubit and presented recent advances in their coherent control. Fluxoniums offer exceptional coherence, in this work demonstrated by single-qubit operations with high fidelity. Ray also presented the advantages of operating fluxoniums at integer flux, offering higher operating frequencies while still being protected from decoherence.

Transmon-based quantum processors build on a longer development history, and researchers can focus on specific improvement methods to boost their performance. Two examples were presented by our customers.

Niklas Glaser from the Walther-Meißner-Insitut presented recent results on optimizing two-qubit gate pulses in a closed loop scheme that maximizes the fidelity measured by randomized benchmarking. This method has already proven successful in optimizing single-qubit gates and has now been shown to improve two-qubit fidelities to 99.8%.

Sebastian Krinner from the Quantum Device Lab at ETH Zurich focused on another performance metric that is increasingly relevant in large QPU operation. He presented a method to reduce leakage into non-computational states. The method builds on the principle of bringing f-level qubit population back into the computational subspace by dissipating excess energy in the readout resonator, and here is demonstrated to reduce f-level population 10-fold.

Quantum Computing in Industry

While academic research has traditionally fueled the development of quantum computing applications, industry picks up the baton more and more. IQM Quantum Computers, for example, is on a development path towards quantum advantage. Finding the right connectivity architecture for the large, high-fidelity QPUs necessary to this goal is a key challenge, which Frank Deppe from IQM Germany addressed in his talk. He presented a star architecture based on a central resonator coupled to multiple qubits as well as realizations of 2-qubit gates in this architecture. The star architecture helps bring the parameter regime of useful NISQ applications and fault-tolerant computing closer.

The long turnaround times for quantum chip testing are often a bottleneck in their development. Providing the infrastructure and tools to speed up chip testing therefore has the potential of accelerating their development towards better reproducibility and performance. Kelvin Loh presented Orange Quantum Systems' offering of a fully integrated R&D system of control electronics and software components. Thanks to automation, this system allows single-qubit characterization in only a few minutes.

Hybrid Qubit Technologies

In the last session of the day, our customers showed what’s possible when combining superconductor and semiconductor technology. Hybrid devices based on Andreev bound states present an interesting platform for studies in fundamental science, but it is not straightforward to integrate these with high-quality superconducting microwave circuitry. Deividas Sabonis from IBM Research Zurich showed how a flip-chip approach helps minimizing dielectric microwave losses in the III-V materials often used to grow the samples. With such a design, the IBM group demonstrated both gate and flux control of single Andreev Bound States, and read out the parity of a superconducting island with high fidelity.

After single qubits come coupled qubits. Luk Yi Cheung showed results from the Nanoelectronics group at University of Basel on realizing strong coupling of two Andreev qubits several millimeters apart through a coplanar-waveguide microwave cavity. The fast gate times of Andreev qubits make them attractive candidates for quantum information processing applications. Luk Yi recently joined Zurich Instruments, where he can bring his application knowledge to our customers directly.

Tutorial Talks

In two tutorial sessions, we aimed to provide our users with practical and useful insights about our products and spark ideas to follow up on in our individual customer support. In the morning, Clemens Müller introduced the concepts and highlights of LabOne Q and demonstrated just how easy and efficient it is to convert OpenQASM quantum circuits into actual signals with LabOne Q. Michele Collodo let us glimpse under the hood of our qubit control hardware, showing the possibilities and mechanics of generating multi-tone, phase-coherent control signals. Oscilloscope expert Jean-Luc Salin from Rohde & Schwarz highlighted the power of a digital trigger system for minimizing jitter and capturing low-amplitude signal features reliably. 

Company Tour, Posters, and Networking

The QT User Meeting offered plenty of opportunities for networking during the coffee breaks, around poster presentations, and at the apéro in our company headquarters. Hosting the event in Zurich meant we could offer a company tour and provide a tangible insight into our testing, production, and work environment that all enable us to deliver quality to our customers. 

If you had the chance to be a part of the QT User Meeting, we hope that you enjoyed the experience as much as we did. Let us know your feedback & impressions from the workshop, and stay tuned for the next one!