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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 361 records · Page 20
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2022

Effective Field Theory of Random Quantum Circuits

Quantum circuits have been widely used as a platform to simulate generic quantum many-body systems. In particular, random quantum circuits provide a means to probe universal features of many-body quantum chaos and ergodicity. Some such features have already been experimentally demonstrated in noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. On the theory side, properties of random quantum circuits have been studied on a case-by-case basis and for certain specific systems, and a hallmark of quantum chaos—universal Wigner–Dyson level statistics—has been derived. This work develops an effective field theory for a large class of random quantum circuits. The theory has the form of a replica sigma model and is similar to the low-energy approach to diffusion in disordered systems. The method is used to explicitly derive the universal random matrix behavior of a large family of random circuits. In particular, we rederive the Wigner–Dyson spectral statistics of the brickwork circuit model by Chan, De Luca, and Chalker [Phys. Rev. X 8, 041019 (2018)] and show within the same calculation that its various permutations and higher-dimensional generalizations preserve the universal level statistics. Finally, we use the replica sigma model framework to rederive the Weingarten calculus, which is a method of evaluating integrals of polynomials of matrix elements with respect to the Haar measure over compact groups and has many applications in the study of quantum circuits. The effective field theory derived here provides both a method to quantitatively characterize the quantum dynamics of random Floquet systems (e.g., calculating operator and entanglement spreading) and a path to understanding the general fundamental mechanism behind quantum chaos and thermalization in these systems.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗
DOE OSTI2024

Scaling whole-chip QAOA for higher-order ising spin glass models on heavy-hex graphs

Abstract We show that the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) for higher-order, random coefficient, heavy-hex compatible spin glass Ising models has strong parameter concentration across problem sizes from 16 up to 127 qubits for p = 1 up to p = 5, which allows for computationally efficient parameter transfer of QAOA angles. Matrix product state (MPS) simulation is used to compute noise-free QAOA performance. Hardware-compatible short-depth QAOA circuits are executed on ensembles of 100 higher-order Ising models on noisy IBM quantum superconducting processors with 16, 27, and 127 qubits using QAOA angles learned from a single 16-qubit instance using the JuliQAOA tool. We show that the best quantum processors find lower energy solutions up to p = 2 or p = 3, and find mean energies that are about a factor of two off from the noise-free distribution. We show that p = 1 QAOA energy landscapes remain very similar as the problem size increases using NISQ hardware gridsearches with up to a 414 qubit processor.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2023

Strong parametric dispersive shifts in a statically decoupled two-qubit cavity QED system

Qubits in cavity quantum electrodynamic (QED) architectures are often operated in the dispersive regime, in which the operating frequency of the cavity depends on the energy state of the qubit, and vice versa. The ability to tune these dispersive shifts provides additional options for performing either quantum measurements or logical manipulations. Here we couple two transmon qubits to a lumped-element cavity through a shared superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID). In this work, our design balances the mutual capacitive and inductive circuit components so that both qubits are statically decoupled from the cavity with low flux sensitivity, offering protection from decoherence processes. Parametric driving of the SQUID flux enables independent, dynamical tuning of each qubit’s interaction with the cavity. As a practical demonstration, we perform pulsed parametric dispersive readout of both qubits. The dispersive frequency shifts of the cavity mode follow the theoretically expected magnitude and sign. This parametric approach creates an extensible, tunable cavity QED framework with various future applications, such as entanglement and error correction via multi-qubit parity readout, state and entanglement stabilization, and parametric logical gates.

77 NANOSCIENCE AND NANOTECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2025

Hardness of Observing Strong-to-Weak Symmetry Breaking

Spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) is the cornerstone of our understanding of quantum phases of matter. Recent works have generalized this concept to the domain of mixed states in open quantum systems, where symmetries can be realized in two distinct ways dubbed strong and weak. Novel intrinsically mixed phases of quantum matter can then be defined by the spontaneous breaking of strong symmetry down to weak symmetry. However, proposed order parameters for strong-to-weak SSB (based on mixed-state fidelities or purities) seem to require exponentially many copies of the state, raising the question: Is it possible to efficiently detect strong-to-weak SSB, in general? In this work, we answer this question negatively in the paradigmatic cases of ℤ2 and U(1) symmetries. We construct ensembles of pseudorandom mixed states that do not break the strong symmetry yet are computationally indistinguishable from states that do. This rules out the existence of efficient state-agnostic protocols to detect strong-to-weak SSB.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2024

Scalable Experimental Bounds for Entangled Quantum State Fidelities

Estimating the state preparation fidelity of highly entangled states on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices is important for benchmarking and application considerations. Unfortunately, exact fidelity measurements quickly become prohibitively expensive, as they scale exponentially as O(3 N for N-qubit states, using full state tomography with measurements in all Pauli bases combinations. However, Somma et al.established that the complexity could be drastically reduced when looking at fidelity lower bounds for states that exhibit symmetries, such as Dicke states and GHZ states. These bounds must still be tight enough for larger states to provide reasonable estimations on NISQ devices. For the first time and more than 15 years after the theoretical introduction, we report meaningful lower bounds for the state preparation fidelity of all Dicke states up to N=10 and all GHZ states up to N=20 on Quantinuum H1 ion-trap systems using efficient implementations of recently proposed scalable circuits for these states. Our achieved lower bounds match or exceed previously reported exact fidelities on superconducting systems for much smaller states. Furthermore, we provide evidence that for large Dicke states |$D^{N}_{N/2}\rangle$, we may resort to a GHZ-based approximate state preparation to achieve better fidelity. This work provides a path forward to benchmarking entanglement as NISQ devices improve in size and quality.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
NASA NTRS1990

High-T(sub c) squid application in medicine and geophysics

In the Laboratory a high-T(sub c) one-hole squid was built from Y1Ba2Cu3O(7-x) ceramics obtained by a standard procedure of solid state reaction. The ceramics with critical current density J(sub c) is greater than 100 A/sq cm was selected. In the middle of 10 x 10 x 2 mm ceramics pellet a 0.8 mm hole was drilled in which superconducting loop of the squid was located. Between the hole and the edge of the pellet a cut was mechanically filed out with a bridge inside it connecting the superconducting ring. A scheme of the magnetometer is presented. The resonant frequency shift of the tank circuit, the connection of the squid with this circuit, and the squid inductance are evaluated. One of the most interesting fields of the squid-based magnetometer application is biomagnetism, particularly, the human heart magnetocardiogram measuring. The low-temperature squids were used in this area and many interesting and important scientific results have been obtained. The observations have shown that the main noise contribution was not due to the squid but to the Earth's magnetic field variations, industrial inductions, and mainly to the vibrations caused by liquid nitrogen boiling and by vibrations of the box. Further attempts are needed to reduce the magnetic noise inductions. Nevertheless, the estimations promise the maximum signal/noise relation of the high-T(sub c) squid-magnetocardiometer to be not less than 10:1 in a bandwidth of 60 Hz. Apparently, such resolution would be enough not only for steady cardiogram reading but even for thin structure investigation at average technique application.

Polushkin, V. N.↗
NASA NTRS1991

High-T(c) squid application in medicine and geophysics

In our laboratory of high-T(sub c), a one-hole squid was built from Y1Ba2Cu3O(7-x) ceramics obtained by a standard procedure of solid state reaction. The ceramics with critical current density J(sub c) is greater than 100 A/sq cm was selected. In the middle of a 10 x 10 x 2 mm ceramics pellet, a 0.8 mm hole was drilled in which the superconducting loop of the squid was located. Between the hole and the edge of the pellet, a cut was mechanically filed out with a bridge inside it connecting the superconducting ring. A scheme of the magnetometer is presented. The resonant frequency shift of the tank circuit, the connection of the squid with this circuit, and the squid inductance are evaluated. One of the most interesting fields of the squid-based magnetometer application is biomagnetism, particularly, the human heart magnetocardiogram measuring. The low-temperature squids were used in this area and many interesting and important scientific results have been obtained. The observations have shown that the main noise contribution was not due to the squid but to the Earth's magnetic field variations, industrial inductions, and mainly to the vibrations caused by liquid nitrogen boiling and by vibrations of the box. Further attempts are needed to reduce the magnetic noise inductions. Nevertheless, the estimations promise the maximum signal/noise relation of the high-T(sub c) squid-magnetocardiometer to be not less than 10:1 in a bandwidth of 60 Hz. Apparently, such resolution would be enough not only for steady cardiogram reading but even for thin structure investigation at average technique application.

Polushkin, V. N.↗
NASA NTRS1995

HTS Thin Films: Passive Microwave Components and Systems Integration Issues

The excellent microwave properties of the High-Temperature-Superconductors (HTS) have been amply demonstrated in the laboratory by techniques such as resonant cavity, power transmission and microstrip resonator measurements. The low loss and high Q passive structures made possible with HTS, present attractive options for applications in commercial, military and space-based systems. However, to readily insert HTS into these systems, improvement is needed in such areas as repeatability in the deposition and processing of the HTS films, metal-contact formation, wire bonding, and overall film endurance to fabrication and assembly procedures. In this paper, we present data compiled in our lab which illustrate many of the problems associated with these issues. Much of this data were obtained in the production of a space qualified hybrid receiver-downconverter module for the Naval Research Laboratory's High Temperature Superconductivity Space Experiment II (HTSSE-II). Examples of variations observed in starting films and finished circuits will be presented. It is shown that under identical processing the properties of the HTS films can degrade to varying extents. Finally, we present data on ohmic contacts and factors affecting their adhesion to HTS films, strength of wire bonds made to such contacts, and aging effects.

Miranda, F. A.↗
NASA NTRS2013

Superconducting Metallic Glass Transition-Edge-Sensors

A superconducting metallic glass transition-edge sensor (MGTES) and a method for fabricating the MGTES are provided. A single-layer superconducting amorphous metal alloy is deposited on a substrate. The single-layer superconducting amorphous metal alloy is an absorber for the MGTES and is electrically connected to a circuit configured for readout and biasing to sense electromagnetic radiation.

Hays, Charles C.↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Preparing Quantum Many-Body Scar States on Quantum Computers

Quantum many-body scar states are highly excited eigenstates of many-body systems that exhibit atypical entanglement and correlation properties relative to other eigenstates at the same energy density. Scar states also give rise to infinitely long-lived coherent dynamics when the system is prepared in a special initial state having finite overlap with them. Many models with exact scar states have been constructed, but the fate of scarred eigenstates and dynamics when these models are perturbed is difficult to study with classical computational techniques. In this work, we propose state preparation protocols for individual scar states in a particular model, as well as superpositions of them that give rise to coherent dynamics. For superpositions of scar states, we propose both a linear depth unitary and a finite-depth nonunitary state preparation protocol, the latter of which uses measurement and postselection to reduce the circuit depth. For individual scarred eigenstates, we propose a circuit architecture with polynomial depth. We also provide proof of principle implementations of these protocols on superconducting quantum hardware.

Quantum Computing↗
DOE OSTI2021

Beamline Spectroscopy of Integrated Circuits With Hard X-Ray Transition Edge Sensors at the Advanced Photon Source

At Argonne National Laboratory, we are developing hard X-ray (2 to 20 keV) Transition Edge Sensor (TES) arrays for beamline science. The significantly improved energy resolution provided by superconducting detectors compared to semiconductor-based energy-dispersive detectors, but with better collection efficiency than wavelength-dispersive instruments, will enable greatly improved X-ray emission and absorption spectroscopic measurements. Additionally, a prototype instrument with 24 microwave-frequency multiplexed pixels is now in testing at the Advanced Photon Source (APS) 1-BM beamline. Initial measurements show an energy resolution ten times better (150 eV compared to < 15 eV) than the silicon-drift detectors currently available to APS beamline users, and in particular demonstrate the ability to resolve closely-spaced emission lines in samples containing multiple transition metal elements, such as integrated circuits. Comparing fluorescence spectra of integrated circuits measured with our TESs at the beamline to those measured with silicon detectors, we find emission lines and elements largely hidden (e.g. Hf alongside Cu) from a semiconductor-based detector but well resolved by a TES. This directly shows the strengths of TES-based instruments in fluorescence mapping.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗
DOE OSTI2024

Superconducting Qubits above 20 GHz Operating over 200 mK

Current state-of-the-art superconducting microwave qubits are cooled to extremely low temperatures to avoid sources of decoherence. Higher qubit operating temperatures would significantly increase the cooling power available, which is desirable for scaling up the number of qubits in quantum computing architectures and integrating qubits in experiments requiring increased heat dissipation. To operate superconducting qubits at higher temperatures, it is necessary to address both quasiparticle decoherence (which becomes significant for aluminum junctions above 160 mK) and dephasing from thermal microwave photons (which are problematic above 50 mK). Using low-loss niobium-trilayer junctions, which have reduced sensitivity to quasiparticles due to the higher superconducting transition temperature of niobium, we fabricate transmons with higher frequencies than previously studied, up to 24 GHz. We measure decoherence and dephasing times of about 1 μs, corresponding to average qubit quality factors of approximately 10 5 , and find that decoherence is unaffected by quasiparticles up to 1 K. Without relaxation from quasiparticles, we are able to explore dephasing from purely thermal sources, finding that our qubits can operate up to approximately 250 mK while maintaining similar performance. The thermal resilience of these qubits creates new options for scaling up quantum processors, enables hybrid quantum experiments with high heat-dissipation budgets, and introduces a material platform for even-higher-frequency qubits.

Josephson junctions↗
DOE OSTI2020

Critical Fluorescence of a Transmon at the Schmid Transition

Here, we investigate inelastic microwave photon scattering by a transmon qubit embedded in a high-impedance circuit. The transmon undergoes a charge-localization (Schmid) transition upon the impedance reaching the critical value. Due to the unique transmon level structure, the fluorescence spectrum carries a signature of the transition point. At higher circuit impedance, quasielastic photon scattering may account for the main part of the inelastic scattering cross-section; we find its dependence on the qubit and circuit parameters.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗
DOE OSTI2022

Quantum error mitigation by hidden inverses protocol in superconducting quantum devices

We present a method to improve the convergence of variational algorithms based on hidden inverses (HIs) to mitigate coherent errors. In the context of error mitigation, this means replacing the hardware implementation of certain Hermitian gates with their inverses. Doing so results in noise cancellation and a more resilient quantum circuit. This approach improves performance in a variety of two-qubit error models where the noise operator also inverts with the gate inversion. We apply the mitigation scheme on superconducting quantum processors running the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) algorithm to find the H 2 ground-state energy. When implemented on superconducting hardware we find that the mitigation scheme effectively reduces the energy fluctuations in the parameter learning path in VQE, reducing the number of iterations for a converged value. We also provide a detailed numerical simulation of VQE performance under different noise models and explore how HIs and randomized compiling affect the underlying loss landscape of the learning problem. These simulations help explain our experimental hardware outcomes, helping to connect lower-level gate performance to application-specific behavior in contrast to metrics like fidelity which often do not provide an intuitive insight into observed high level performance.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗
DOE OSTI2025

Time-tagging data acquisition system for testing superconducting electronics based on an RFSoC and custom analog frontend

Novel electronic devices can often be operated in a plethoraof ways, which makes testing circuits comprised of them difficult.Often, no single tool can simultaneously analyze the operatingmargins, maximum speed, and failure modes of a circuit, particularlywhen the intended behavior of subcomponents of the circuit is notstandardized. This work demonstrates a cost-effective time-domaindata acquisition system for electronic circuits that enables moreintricate verification techniques than are practical withconventional experimental setups. We use high-speeddigital-to-analog converters and real-timemulti-gigasample-per-second waveform processing to push experimentalcircuits beyond their maximum operating speed. Our customtime-tagging data capture firmware reduces memory requirements andcan be used to determine when errors occur. The firmware iscombined with a thermal-noise-limited analog frontend with50 dB of dynamic range. Compared to currentlyavailable commercial test equipment that is seven times moreexpensive, this data acquisition system was able to operate asuperconducting shift register at a nearly three-times-higher clockfrequency (200 MHz vs. 80 MHz).

Foster, Reed A. [MIT] (ORCID:0000000231002127)↗
DOE OSTI2025

Characterizing and Modeling the Influence of Geometry on the Performance of Superconducting Nanowire Cryotrons

The scaling of superconducting nanowire detectors to larger arrays is often limited by room-temperature-readout cabling. Cryogenic integrated circuits constructed from nanowire cryotrons, or nanocryotrons, can address this limitation by performing signal processing on chip. In this study, we characterize key performance metrics of the nanocryotron to elucidate its potential as a logical element in cryogenic integrated circuits and develop an electro-thermal model to connect material parameters with device performance. We find that the performance of the nanocryotron depends on the device geometry, and trade-offs are associated with optimizing the gain, jitter, and energy dissipation. Here, we demonstrate that nanocryotrons fabricated on niobium nitride can achieve a grey zone less than 210 nA wide for a 5 ns long input pulse corresponding to a maximum achievable gain of 48 dB, an energy dissipation of less than 20 aJ per operation, and a jitter of less than 60 ps.

Superconductor↗
DOE OSTI2025

Low-latency quantum control using AI algorithms on cryogenic microelectronics platforms

Superconducting quantum computers are a particular technology that involve the realization of qubits by means of LC circuits with a Josephson junction. As shown in Fig. 1, this latter addition has the effect of introducing a nonlinearity (anharmonicity) that makes the frequency spacing between each energy level non-uniform. This is a desired effect for separating the two lowest levels, used for computation, from the higher ones, that are theoretically infinite and which are not desired to be used.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
NASA NTRS1987

Advanced Components for Spaceborne Infrared Astronomy

Basic improvements in the technology of low noise read-out systems for low background detectors were demonstrated. Using discrete JFET integrating amplifiers at their optimum temperature of 55 K, read noise less than 7.5 electrons in 128 seconds of integration was obtained. Two models of single channel integrators are now available, the JF-77 for use between 50 and 80 K and the JF-4 for lower temperatures. A 1 x 15 linear array of complete integrators on a single integrated circuit was developed and will be made available in the near future. The successful operation of a superconducting stepper motor was demonstrated. The motor shows a three fold increase in torque over conventional motors operating at room temperature. The success of the motor stems from the use of superconducting coils in conjunction with developments in bearings for cryogenic use, rare-earth rotors, and motor cooling techniques. The current state of development will allow the rapid development of motors optimized for specific applications. An electronic switch capable of resetting cooled JFET integrating amplifiers was developed. The JFET integrating amplifiers that use this switch have demonstrated read noise of less than 10 electrons. The JFET reset device exhibits an extremely high open impedance and low leakage current. Capacitance is sufficiently low so as not to impair amplifier sensitivity. The effects of transient switching charges are minimized by a compensation technique and variable transient current problems inherent to devices of this type are overcome by external circuity.

Davidson, Arnold W.↗