Superconducting circuit protected by two-Cooper-pair tunneling

  1. W. C. Smith,
  2. A. Kou,
  3. X. Xiao,
  4. U. Vool,
  5. and M. H. Devoret
We present a protected superconducting qubit based on an effective circuit element that only allows pairs of Cooper pairs to tunnel. These dynamics give rise to a nearly degenerate
ground state manifold indexed by the parity of tunneled Cooper pairs. We show that, when the circuit element is shunted by a large capacitance, this manifold can be used as a logical qubit that we expect to be insensitive to multiple relaxation and dephasing mechanisms.