Conditional-squeezing gate in superconducting circuits

Abstract: We present an implementation of a conditional-squeezing gate that squeezes a SQUID-terminated resonator mode along a direction determined by the state of a dispersively coupled qubit. This gate generalizes the controlled-squeezing gate [Phys. Rev. A \textbf{111}, 042606 (2025)], and relies on a refocusing technique to suppress unwanted effects arising from slowly varying time-dependent terms in the Hamiltonian during the state-dependent parametric resonance required for the operation. As an application, we use the gate to encode an arbitrary qubit state into superpositions of single- and two-mode squeezed states of the resonator. These non-Gaussian states enable error-detectable encoding through parity measurements. We show that refocusing substantially improves the encoding fidelity, which is ultimately limited by Kerr nonlinearities and dissipation in realistic implementations. For experimentally optimistic values of the nonlinearities and decay rates, we obtain encoding fidelities above 0.99 for arbitrary input qubit states. Our results provide a route toward extending this scheme to the generation of higher-order superpositions of squeezed states (a class of rotation-symmetric bosonic codes) using a control qudit.