Fast, unconditional reset and leakage reduction in fixed-frequency transmon qubits

On-demand qubit-state initialization is a prerequisite for quantum computation. We demonstrate such a protocol in a device consisting of fixed-frequency transmon qubits pair-wise coupled via tunable couplers — an architecture that is also compatible with the surface code. We use tunable couplers to transfer any undesired qubit excitation to the readout resonator of the qubit, from which this excitation decays into the feedline. In total, the combination of multi-level qubit reset, leakage reduction, and coupler reset takes only 88 ns to complete. Our reset scheme is fast, unconditional, and achieves fidelities above 99%, thus enabling fixed-frequency qubit architectures as future implementations of fault-tolerant quantum computers.