Michael Hatridge (Yale) - Applications and Limits of Parametric Driving in Superconducting Circuits

Parametric driving has long been used in very low quality factor, weakly nonlinear superconducting circuits to create nearly quantum-limited ‘parametric’ amplifiers, which are in wide use for the readout of superconducting qubits.   However, the off-resonant terms we can activate with parametric driving are ubiquitous in Josephson-junction based circuits, and are increasingly used for a variety of gates and other controls in superconducting quantum information processors.  In this talk, I’ll focus on an important outstanding issue, which is our ability to explain and predict how hard we can parametrically drive our circuits before they break.  I’ll show recent results on matching theory and experiment on transmon qubits as parametric couplers, and discuss the prospects for extending this work to more complicated couplers and gates.