Protected gates for superconducting qubits

We analyze the accuracy of quantum phase gates acting on „zero-pi qubits“ in superconducting circuits, where the gates are protected against thermal and Hamiltonian noise by continuous-variable quantum error-correcting codes. The gates are executed by turning on and off a tunable Josephson coupling between an LC oscillator and a qubit or pair of quits; assuming perfect qubits, we show that the gate errors are exponentially small when the oscillator’s impedance sqrt{L/C} is large compared to hbar/4e^2 ~ 1 kilo-ohm. The protected gates are not computationally universal by themselves, but a scheme for universal fault-tolerant quantum computation can be constructed by combining them with unprotected noisy operations. We validate our analytic arguments with numerical simulations.