0-$\pi$ qubit in one Josephson junction

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel parity-protected 0-$ ext{pi}$ superconducting qubit using a single superconductor-semiconductor Josephson junction, enhancing hardware-level quantum state protection without increasing device complexity.

Contribution

It introduces a new 0-$ ext{pi}$ qubit design leveraging spin-orbit coupling and Zeeman splitting in a single junction, simplifying fabrication and improving robustness.

Findings

Achieves parity protection with one Josephson junction.

Demonstrates immunity to fabrication imperfections.

Utilizes spin-orbit coupling for tunable Josephson effects.

Abstract

Quantum states are usually fragile which makes quantum computation being not as stable as classical computation. Quantum correction codes can protect quantum states but need a large number of physical qubits to code a single logic qubit. Alternatively, the protection at the hardware level has been recently developed to maintain the coherence of the quantum information by using symmetries. However, it generally has to pay the expense of increasing the complexity of the quantum devices. In this work, we show that the protection at the hardware level can be approached without increasing the complexity of the devices. The interplay between the spin-orbit coupling and the Zeeman splitting in the semiconductor allows us to tune the Josephson coupling in terms of the spin degree of freedom of Cooper pairs, the hallmark of the superconducting spintronics. This leads to the implementation of the parity-protected 0-$\pi$ superconducting qubit with only one highly transparent superconductor-semiconductor Josephson junction, which makes our proposal immune from the various fabrication imperfections.