Speaker
Description
Ionizing radiation from cosmic rays and terrestrial sources creates non-equilibrium quasiparticles that limit superconducting qubit coherence times. This is a major hurdle for fault-tolerant quantum computing. To isolate and study this decoherence mechanism, the "QUTEbits" collaboration is utilizing the exceptionally low-radiation environment of the Cryogenic Underground TEst facility (CUTE) at SNOLAB, which is located 2 km underground. By comparing the performance of the same superconducting qubits and resonators in both surface laboratories (at the University of Waterloo) and deep underground (at SNOLAB), we aim to quantify the direct impact of environmental radiation on quantum systems. This talk will outline the project's experimental setup and discuss preliminary findings from our first underground measurements.