Browsing by Author "Vaaranta, Antti"

One of the main ways of physically realizing quantum bits for the purposes of quantum technology is to manufacture them as superconducting circuits. These qubits are artificially built two-level systems that act as carriers of quantum information. They come in a variety of types but one of the most common in use is the transmon qubit. The transmon is a more stable, improved version of the earlier types of superconducting qubits with longer coherence times. The qubit cannot function properly on its own, as it needs other circuit elements around it for control and readout of its state. Thus the qubit is only a small part of a larger superconducting circuit interacting with the qubit. Understanding this interaction, where it comes from and how it can be modified to our liking, allows researchers to design better quantum circuits and to improve the existing ones. Understanding how the noise, travelling through the qubit drive lines to the chip, affects the time evolution of the qubit is especially important. Reducing the amount of noise leads to longer coherence times but it is also possible to engineer the noise to our advantage to uncover novel ways of quantum control. In this thesis the effects of a variable temperature noise source on the qubit drive line is studied. A theoretical model describing the time evolution of the quantum state is built. The model starts from the basic elements of the quantum circuit and leads to a master equation describing the qubit dynamics. This allows us to understand how the different choices made in the manufacturing process of the quantum circuit affect the time evolution. As a proof of concept, the model is solved numerically using QuTiP in the specific case of a fixed-frequency, dispersive transmon qubit. The solution shows a decohering qubit with no dissipation. The model is also solved in a temperature range 0K < T ≤ 1K to show how the decoherence times behave with respect to the temperature of the noise source.