2017 Van Duzer Prize Paper "Investigating Surface Loss Effects in Superconducting Transmon Qubits"
Jay M. Gambetta, Conal E. Murray, Y.-K.-K. Fung, Douglas T. McClure, Oliver Dial, William Shanks, Jeffrey W. Sleight, Matthias Steffen
For the paper "Investigating Surface Loss Effects in Superconducting Transmon Qubits"
IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity
Vol. 27, No. 1, January 2017, Paper 1700205
The paper addresses the design of superconducting quantum bits (qubits) for maximum coherence. It presents a systematic study of planar superconducting transmons of differing physical footprints to optimize the qubit design. It was found that qubits with small footprints are limited by surface loss and that qubits with large footprints are limited by other loss mechanisms. The results provide guidance for quantum circuit designers. It also motivates the development of better surface treatment methods to enable smaller area qubits with good coherence, as well as the development of additional strategies to understand loss mechanisms for qubits. This paper received 14 citations within the first 2 years based on google scholar. This indicates the high immediacy and impact of this paper.