The Floquet Fluxonium Molecule: Driving Down Dephasing in Coupled Superconducting Qubits

High-coherence qubits, which can store and manipulate quantum states for long times with low error rates, are necessary building blocks for quantum computers. We propose a superconducting qubit architecture that uses a Floquet flux drive to modify the spectrum of a static fluxonium molecule. The computational eigenstates have two key properties: disjoint support to minimize bit flips, along with first- and second-order insensitivity to flux noise dephasing. The rates of the three main error types are estimated through numerical simulations, with predicted coherence times of approximately 50 ms in the computational subspace and erasure lifetimes of about 500 μs. We give a protocol for high-fidelity single qubit rotation gates via additional flux modulation on timescales of roughly 500 ns. Our results indicate that driven qubits are able to outperform some of their static counterparts.