A superconducting qutrit link beyond the qubit limit

Abstract: Superconducting microwave links have enabled deterministic state transfer and remote entanglement between qubits, but deterministic links have so far operated with an effectively two-dimensional transmitted Hilbert space. Here we demonstrate a superconducting qutrit link between two independently packaged nodes connected by a microwave channel. Each node combines a transmon qutrit, a transmission resonator, and a tunable Purcell-filter interface, allowing the two remote microwave-photon interfaces to be matched in both frequency and bandwidth. We implement two transition-selective photon-mediated operations that transfer the $|e\rangle$ and $|f\rangle$ qutrit components in distinct temporal modes of the same channel. We tomographically characterize arbitrary qutrit-state transfer, obtaining a mean transferred-state fidelity of 83.68% and a qutrit process fidelity of 77.12%, exceeding both the classical qutrit-transfer benchmark and the best possible average fidelity of an effective qubit channel used to transmit an arbitrary qutrit. Using partial-transfer operations, we reconstruct a remote two-qutrit state with negativity 0.730, a tomography-inferred dense-coding capacity of 2.273 bits, and a tomography-inferred Collins-Gisin-Linden-Massar-Popescu (CGLMP) parameter $I_3=2.332$, all beyond the corresponding qubit or local bounds. These results demonstrate a superconducting microwave link that uses the native three-level structure of transmons as a genuine high-dimensional communication resource.