Disentangling the sources of ionizing radiation in superconducting qubits
L. Cardani, I. Colantoni, A. Cruciani, Florence De Dominicis, G. D’imperio, M. Laubenstein, A. Mariani, L. Pagnanini, S. Pirro, C. Tomei, N. Casali, F. Ferroni, D. Frolov, L. Gironi, Anna Grassellino, M. Junker, Cameron Kopas, E. Lachman, Corey Rae McRae, J. Mutus, M. Nastasi, David P. Pappas, Roman Pilipenko, M. Sisti, V. Pettinacci, Alexander Romanenko, D. Van Zanten, M. Vignati, J. D. Withrow, Nikolay Zhelev
Abstract
Abstract Radioactivity was recently discovered as a source of decoherence and correlated errors for the real-world implementation of superconducting quantum processors. In this work, we measure levels of radioactivity present in a typical laboratory environment (from muons, neutrons, and $$\gamma $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>γ</mml:mi> </mml:math> -rays emitted by naturally occurring radioactive isotopes) and in the most commonly used materials for the assembly and operation of state-of-the-art superconducting qubits. We present a GEANT-4 based simulation to predict the rate of impacts and the amount of energy released in a qubit chip from each of the mentioned sources. We finally propose mitigation strategies for the operation of next-generation qubits in a radio-pure environment.