Suppression of Quasiparticle Poisoning to $10^{-11}$ Levels in Superconducting Qubits via Infrared Shielding

Quasiparticle poisoning bottlenecks superconducting qubits, limiting coherence and the scalability of quantum processors. In this work, we systematically investigate quasiparticle poisoning in superconducting qubits under three infrared (IR) shielding configurations, ranging from a dedicated multi-layer design to a simplified implementation. By measuring quasiparticle-induced parity switching, we demonstrate a suppression of the switching rate by over four orders of magnitude via the implementation of improved shielding. In the best configuration, the rate decreases over time following cooldown and reaches 0.069$\,$Hz on day 34, corresponding to an anticipated quasiparticle density per Cooper pair of $1.88\times10^{-11}$. To our knowledge, this represents the lowest quasiparticle density reported in the literature to date. The remaining quasiparticle population is likely dominated by sporadic phonon bursts stemming from mechanical stress release in the on-chip films, as well as from the surrounding environment. The effective qubit temperature follows the phonon bath down to 17$\,$mK, enabling initialization errors of $\sim 0.01\%$ for 3$\,$GHz qubits. These results demonstrate that proper IR shielding and thermalization are essential for suppressing quasiparticle poisoning and enabling high-coherence, scalable superconducting qubit systems.

Source: arXiv:2606.07339v1 - http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07339v1 PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.07339v1 Original Link: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07339v1