Suppression of Static ZZ Interaction in an All-Transmon Quantum Processor

Abstract

The superconducting transmon qubit is currently a leading qubit modality for quantum computing, but the gate performance in a quantum processor with transmons is often insufficient to support the running of complex algorithms for practical applications. It is thus highly desirable to further improve gate performance. Due to the weak anharmonicity of a transmon, a static $ZZ$ interaction between coupled transmons commonly exists, undermining the gate performance and, in the long term, it can become performance limiting. Here, we theoretically explore a promising parameter region in an all-transmon system to address this issue. We show that a feasible parameter region, where the $ZZ$ interaction is heavily suppressed, while leaving the $XY$ interaction with an adequate strength to implement two-qubit gates, can be found for all-transmon systems. Thus, two-qubit gates, such as a cross-resonance gate or an iswap gate, can be realized without a detrimental effect from the static $ZZ$ interaction. To illustrate this, we demonstrate that an iswap gate with a fast gate speed and dramatically lower conditional phase error can be achieved. By scaling up to a large-scale transmon quantum processor, especially for cases with fixed coupling, addressing errors, idling errors, and crosstalk that arise from the static $ZZ$ interaction can also be strongly suppressed.