Quantum computers have the capability to improve the efficiency and speed of many computational tasks. Among different candidates for physical implementation of quantum bits (qubits), superconducting qubits are currently one of the most promising candidates due to their accessible fabrication process and recent rapid developments. Measurement of these qubits is usually done in a circuit quantum electrodynamics (QED) setup, for which experimental and theoretical research is conducted to improve the accuracy and speed of the qubit readout. In this dissertation we study some aspects of the dispersive readout of superconducting qubits, and introduce tools and methods for studying these systems.

In Chapter 2 we show that in presence of neighboring qubits, the system is typically measured in the basis of joint eigenstates of qubits, in contrast to what is expected from the textbook collapse postulate. In such setups, the excitation can switch between the eigenstates, leading to measurement error. In Chapter 3 we study the joint state of the qubit-resonator system during the measurement, and show that the qubit-induced nonlinearity of the resonator squeezes its state, and within the rotating wave approximation (RWA) the system mostly remains in the joint eigenladder that is associated with the qubit's initial state. In Chapter 4 we show that built-in energy resonances in the qubit-resonator Jaynes-Cummings ladder occur at specific resonator populations, and the couplings between these resonant levels are provided by the usually neglected non-RWA terms. Such resonances lead to measurement deterioration by exciting the qubit out of the computational subspace. In Chapter 5 we provide a hybrid phase-space-Fock-space approach for studying the evolution and squeezing of driven nonlinear resonators within Gaussian approximation, which is numerically efficient and sufficiently accurate. In Chapter 6 we study the propagating squeezed field that leaks out of the resonator, and write evolution equations for the correlators of the measured field quadrature. These equations are easy to simulate and can describe the squeezing of the propagating field during the transient, which can be used to optimize the fidelity and speed of the quadrature measurement in the dispersive readout of superconducting qubits.

An important challenge in quantum information science and quantum computing is the experimental realization of high-fidelity quantum operations on multi-qubit systems. Quantum process tomography (QPT) is a procedure devised to fully characterize a quantum operation. We first present the results of the estimation of the process matrix for superconducting multi-qubit quantum gates using the full data set employing various methods: linear inversion, maximum likelihood, and least-squares. To alleviate the problem of exponential resource scaling needed to characterize a multi-qubit system, we next investigate a compressed sensing (CS) method for QPT of two-qubit and three-qubit quantum gates. Using experimental data for two-qubit controlled-Z gates, taken with both Xmon and superconducting phase qubits, we obtain estimates for the process matrices with reasonably high fidelities compared to full QPT, despite using significantly reduced sets of initial states and measurement configurations. We show that the CS method still works when the amount of data is so small that the standard QPT would have an underdetermined system of equations. We also apply the CS method to the analysis of the three-qubit Toffoli gate with simulated noise, and similarly show that the method works well for a substantially reduced set of data. For the CS calculations we use two different bases in which the process matrix is approximately sparse (the Pauli-error basis and the singular value decomposition basis), and show that the resulting estimates of the process matrices match with reasonably high fidelity. For both two-qubit and three-qubit gates, we characterize the quantum process by its process matrix and average state fidelity, as well as by the corresponding standard deviation defined via the variation of the state fidelity for different initial states. We calculate the standard deviation of the average state fidelity both analytically and numerically, using a Monte Carlo method. Overall, we show that CS QPT offers a significant reduction in the needed amount of experimental data for two-qubit and three-qubit quantum gates.