Measurement and dephasing of a flux qubit due to heat currents

We study a flux qubit, made of a superconducting loop interrupted by three Josephson junctions, which is subject to a temperature gradient. We show that the heat current induced by the temperature gradient, being sensitive to the superconducting phase differences at the junctions, depends significantly on the state of the qubit. We furthermore investigate the impact of the heat current on the coherence properties of the qubit state. We have found that even small temperature gradients can lead to dephasing times of the order of microseconds for the Delft-qubit design.