Understanding the mechanisms that limit high-fidelity readout in circuit quantum electrodynamics is essential for its optimization. Multi-photon resonances are understood to be a limitingfactor, causing population transfer from the computational states to higher-energy states under drive. This effect, known as measurement-induced state transitions, has been extensively studied for the transmon qubit. While this exploration has begun for the fluxonium qubit, a systematic study of this effect is lacking. Here, we bridge this gap by theoretically studying measurement-induced state transitions in the fluxonium qubit over a wide range of parameters, comprising essentially all experimentally explored ranges. We find that lighter fluxoniums are less susceptible to these state transitions when compared to their heavier counterparts. We attribute this effect to the combination of lower density of multi-photon resonances, a smaller requisite coupling for a given dispersive shift, and a more harmonic-like structure of the charge operator. We confirm the validity of our analysis by performing time-dependent readout simulations. Finally, we consider the impact of the superinductor’s array modes on measurement-induced state transitions over a large range of parameters.
We propose and analyze two types of microwave-activated gates between a fluxonium and a transmon qubit, namely a cross-resonance (CR) and a CPHASE gate. The large frequency differencebetween a transmon and a fluxonium makes the realization of a two-qubit gate challenging. For a medium-frequency fluxonium qubit, the transmon-fluxonium system allows for a cross-resonance effect mediated by the higher levels of the fluxonium over a wide range of transmon frequencies. This allows one to realize the cross-resonance gate by driving the fluxonium at the transmon frequency, mitigating typical problems of the cross-resonance gate in transmon-transmon chips related to frequency targeting and residual ZZ coupling. However, when the fundamental frequency of the fluxonium enters the low-frequency regime below 100 MHz, the cross-resonance effect decreases leading to long gate times. For this range of parameters, a fast microwave CPHASE gate can be implemented using the higher levels of the fluxonium. In both cases, we perform numerical simulations of the gate showing that a gate fidelity above 99% can be obtained with gate times between 100 and 300 ns. Next to a detailed gate analysis, we perform a study of chip yield for a surface code lattice of fluxonia and transmons interacting via the proposed cross-resonance gate. We find a much better yield as compared to a transmon-only architecture with the cross-resonance gate as native two-qubit gate.
Leakage outside of the qubit computational subspace poses a threatening challenge to quantum error correction (QEC). We propose a scheme using two leakage-reduction units (LRUs) thatmitigate these issues for a transmon-based surface code, without requiring an overhead in terms of hardware or QEC-cycle time as in previous proposals. For data qubits we consider a microwave drive to transfer leakage to the readout resonator, where it quickly decays, ensuring that this negligibly affects the coherence within the computational subspace for realistic system parameters. For ancilla qubits we apply a |1⟩↔|2⟩ π pulse conditioned on the measurement outcome. Using density-matrix simulations of the distance-3 surface code we show that the average leakage lifetime is reduced to almost 1 QEC cycle, even when the LRUs are implemented with limited fidelity. Furthermore, we show that this leads to a significant reduction of the logical error rate. This LRU scheme opens the prospect for near-term scalable QEC demonstrations.