An efficient and compact switch for quantum circuits

The engineering of quantum devices has reached the stage where we now have small-scale quantum processors containing multiple interacting qubits within them. Simple quantum circuits have been demonstrated and scaling up to larger numbers is underway. However, as the number of qubits in these processors increases, it becomes challenging to implement switchable or tunable coherent coupling among them. The typical approach has been to detune each qubit from others or the quantum bus it connected to, but as the number of qubits increases this becomes problematic to achieve in practice due to frequency crowding issues. Here, we demonstrate that by applying a fast longitudinal control field to the target qubit, we can turn off its couplings to other qubits or buses. This has important implications in superconducting circuits as it means we can keep the qubits at their optimal points, where the coherence properties are greatest, during coupling/decoupling process. Our approach suggests another way to control coupling among qubits and data buses that can be naturally scaled up to large quantum processors.