Exciting qubits and excited quasiparticles: the effect of actively pumping a qubit on its environment

In recent years, sophisticated control schemes for exploring and, moreover, reducing noise in quantum devices are being heavily investigated. Two important noise mechanisms in superconducting circuits that are being explored extensively and for which such control schemes have been employed, are quasiparticle tunneling and two-level systems. Here we shed more light on the subject by utilizing the Quantum Orchestration Platform, a unique control platform that provides ultra-low-latency feedback and great programming flexibility, to carefully design control sequences and explore their effect on the quasiparticle environment of a superconducting fluxonium qubit. We show striking results that demonstrate a highly non-linear environment with non-exponential and very low decay rates.