Efficient Control of a Transmon Qudit Using Effective Spin- 7 / 2 Rotations
Elizabeth Champion, Zihao Wang, Rayleigh W. Parker, Machiel S. Blok · Physical Review X · 2025
Qudits hold great promise for efficient quantum computation and the simulation of high-dimensional quantum systems [1]. However, existing control and measurement schemes for qudit systems scale unfavorably with qudit dimension since they decompose S U ( d ) operations into series of qubitlike rotations and perform measurements on a small number of states [2–6]. Here, we address these challenges by employing simultaneous multifrequency drives to generate rotations and projections in an effective spin- 7 / 2 system mapped onto the energy eigenstates of a superconducting circuit. We implement single-shot readout of the eight states using a multitone dispersive readout ( F assignment = 88.3 % ) and exploit the strong nonlinearity in a high- E J / E C transmon to simultaneously address each transition and realize a spin displacement operator. Combining this displacement operator with a virtual SNAP gate, we realize arbitrary single-qudit unitary operations in O ( d ) physical pulses and extract spin displacement gate fidelities ranging from 0.997 to 0.989 for virtual spins of size j = 1 to j = 7 / 2 . We demonstrate the potential of our control scheme in three ways: the direct measurement of the spin qudit Wigner function, randomized benchmarking of a logical qubit encoded into the qudit state, and randomized benchmarking of the full qudit Clifford group. In the latter experiment, we implement the d -dimensional quantum Fourier transform with an average gate fidelity of 0.91(6) in d = 8 . Our multifrequency approach to qudit control and measurement can be readily extended to other physical platforms that realize a multilevel system coupled to a cavity and can become a building block for efficient qudit-based quantum computation and simulation.