Radioactivity was recently discovered as a source of decoherence and correlated errors for the real-world implementation of superconducting quantum processors. In this work, we measure levels of radioactivity present in a typical laboratory environment (from muons, neutrons, and gamma's emitted by naturally occurring radioactive isotopes) and in the most commonly used materials for the assembly and operation of state-of-the-art superconducting qubits. We develop a GEANT-4 based simulation to predict the rate of impacts and the amount of energy released in a qubit chip from each of the mentioned sources. We finally propose mitigation strategies for the operation of next-generation qubits in a radio-pure environment.
@article{arxiv.2211.13597,
title = {Disentangling the sources of ionizing radiation in superconducting qubits},
author = {L. Cardani and I. Colantoni and A. Cruciani and F. De Dominicis and G. D'Imperio and M. Laubenstein and A. Mariani and L. Pagnanini and S. Pirro and C. Tomei and N. Casali and F. Ferroni and D. Frolov and L. Gironi and A. Grassellino and M. Junker and C. Kopas and E. Lachman and C. R. H. McRae and J. Mutus and M. Nastasi and D. P. Pappas and R. Pilipenko and M. Sisti and V. Pettinacci and A. Romanenko and D. Van Zanten and M. Vignati and J. D. Withrow and N. Z. Zhelev},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.13597},
year = {2023}
}