Millisecond coherence in a superconducting qubit

TL;DR

This paper reports a fluxonium superconducting qubit achieving a record coherence time of 1.48 ms, leading to extremely high gate fidelity, and demonstrates suppression of quasiparticle effects, advancing quantum processor development.

Contribution

The study introduces a fluxonium qubit with unprecedented coherence time and gate fidelity, surpassing previous solid-state quantum systems, and confirms quasiparticle effects are negligible in this setup.

Findings

Ramsey coherence time of 1.48 ms

Single-qubit gate fidelity above 0.9999

Quasiparticle effects are negligible

Abstract

Increasing the degree of control over physical qubits is a crucial component of quantum computing research. We report a superconducting qubit of fluxonium type with the Ramsey coherence time reaching $T_2^*= 1.48 \pm 0.13 \mathrm{~ms}$, which exceeds the state of the art value by an order of magnitude. As a result, the average single-qubit gate fidelity grew above $0.9999$, surpassing, to our knowledge, any other solid-state quantum system. Furthermore, by measuring energy relaxation of the parity-forbidden transition to second excited state, we exclude the effect of out-of-equilibrium quasiparticles on coherence in our circuit. Combined with recent demonstrations of two-qubit gates on fluxoniums, our result paves the way for the next generation of quantum processors.