Non-degenerate noise-resilient superconducting qubit

TL;DR

This paper introduces the 'harmonium', a superconducting qubit engineered with specific Josephson energy harmonics, offering enhanced noise resilience and long coherence times demonstrated through simulations and noise modeling.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel superconducting qubit design utilizing engineered Josephson harmonics for improved noise protection and long coherence, supported by time-domain simulations and noise analysis.

Findings

Bit-flip protection due to localization in minima

Phase-flip protection via Born-Oppenheimer approximation

Estimated coherence times: milliseconds to seconds

Abstract

We propose a superconducting qubit based on engineering the first and second harmonics of the Josephson energy and phase relation $E_{J1}\cos \varphi$ and $E_{J2}\cos 2\varphi$. By constructing a circuit such that $E_{J2}$ is negative and $|E_{J1}| \ll |E_{J2}|$, we create a periodic potential with two non-degenerate minima. The qubit, which we dub "harmonium", is formed from the lowest-energy states of each minimum. Bit-flip protection of the qubit arises due to the localization of each qubit state to their respective minima, while phase-flip protection can be understood by considering the circuit within the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. We demonstrate with time-domain simulations that single- and two-qubit gates can be performed in approximately one hundred nanoseconds. Finally, we compute the qubit coherence times using numerical diagonalization of the complete circuit in conjunction with state-of-the-art noise models. We estimate out-of-manifold heating times on the order of milliseconds, which can be treated as erasure errors using conventional dispersive readout. We estimate pure-dephasing times on the order of many tens of milliseconds, and bit-flip times on the order of seconds.