Towards fault-tolerant stabilization of a GKP qubit using a Kerr-cat ancilla (1/2)

Bosonic quantum error correction (QEC) offers a hardware-efficient means of redundantly encoding a logical qubit within the large Hilbert space of a harmonic oscillator. The Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) code is particularly promising for use in the circuit QED architecture since it can efficiently correct for photon loss in the oscillator, which is the dominant source of intrinsic error in state-of-the-art superconducting microwave cavities. In the recent realizations of the GKP code using this architecture, an ancillary qubit is used to stabilize GKP codewords in the cavity, a process which has been shown to be sensitive to ancilla bit-flips but insensitive to ancilla phase-flips [1, 2]. Using a noise-biased ancilla therefore offers a pathway to fault-tolerant error correction of the GKP code [3]. Here, we discuss our experimental progress toward stabilizing the GKP code using a Kerr-cat ancilla.

In the first part of this two-part series of talks, we discuss the design and implementation of our experiment.