Converting qubit relaxation into erasures with a single fluxonium

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a resource-efficient method to convert qubit relaxation into erasures using a single fluxonium device, significantly extending logical qubit lifetime without extra hardware.

Contribution

The authors realize erasure conversion in a fluxonium qubit at zero flux, simplifying hardware requirements and improving logical lifetime through a novel encoding and measurement scheme.

Findings

Logical lifetime increased from 193 μs to 869 μs.

Erasure checks contribute negligible measurement-induced dephasing.

Single fluxonium enables erasure-based error mitigation without extra hardware.

Abstract

Qubits that experience predominantly erasure errors offer distinct advantages for fault-tolerant operation. Indeed, dual-rail encoded erasure qubits in superconducting cavities and transmons have demonstrated high-fidelity operations by converting physical-qubit relaxation into logical-qubit erasures, but this comes at the cost of increased hardware overhead and circuit complexity. Here, we address these limitations by realizing erasure conversion in a single fluxonium operated at zero flux, where the logical state is encoded in its 0-2 subspace. A single, carefully engineered resonator provides both mid-circuit erasure detection and end-of-line (EOL) logical measurement. Post-selection on non-erasure outcomes results in more than four-fold increase of the logical lifetime, from $193~\mu$s to $869~\mu$s. Finally, we characterize measurement-induced logical dephasing as a function of measurement power and frequency, and infer that each erasure check contributes a negligible error of $7.2\times 10^{-5}$. These results establish integer-fluxonium as a promising, resource-efficient platform for erasure-based error mitigation, without requiring additional hardware.