Intrinsically protected superconducting qubits are a promising route toward enhancing coherence times and advancing hardware towards applications in quantum computing. The cos(2φ)qubit achieves protection against qubit relaxation by allowing only the coherent tunneling of pairs of Cooper pairs, resulting in Cooper-pair parity symmetry and thereby suppressing charge-induced errors. In this work, we experimentally realize a cos(2φ) qubit by Fourier engineering the energy-phase relation in a multi-junction superconducting circuit. Using an interference-based architecture, we are able to suppress the odd harmonics of an effective qubit potential and we observe good agreement between the measured transition spectrum and the effective theoretical model. We further investigate the energy relaxation time as a function of external flux and find that the qubit lifetime at the flux symmetry point is limited by 1/f flux noise. This strong sensitivity arises from residual fluctuations in the first harmonic, which possesses a large prefactor despite being nominally canceled. In contrast, a fluxonium qubit with a similar energy spectrum and noise amplitude is less affected by flux noise, highlighting a key challenge for interference-based protection schemes.
Two qubit gates constitute fundamental building blocks in the realization of large-scale quantum devices. Using superconducting circuits, two-qubit gates have previously been implementedin different ways with each method aiming to maximize gate fidelity. Another important goal of a new gate scheme is to minimize the complexity of gate calibration. In this work, we demonstrate a high-fidelity two-qubit gate between two fluxonium qubits enabled by an intermediate capacitively coupled transmon. The coupling strengths between the qubits and the coupler are designed to minimize residual crosstalk while still allowing for fast gate operations. The gate is based on frequency selectively exciting the coupler using a microwave drive to complete a 2π rotation, conditional on the state of the fluxonium qubits. When successful, this drive scheme implements a conditional phase gate. Using analytically derived pulse shapes, we minimize unwanted excitations of the coupler and obtain gate errors of 10−2 for gate times below 60~ns. At longer durations, our gate is limited by relaxation of the coupler. Our results show how carefully designed control pulses can speed up frequency selective entangling gates.
The ability to perform rapid, high fidelity readout of a qubit state is an important requirement for quantum algorithms and, in particular, for enabling operations such as mid-circuitmeasurements and measurement-based feedback for error correction schemes on large quantum processors. The growing interest in fluxonium qubits, due to their long coherence times and high anharmonicity, merits further attention to reducing the readout duration and measurement errors. We find that this can be accomplished by exploiting the flux tunability of fluxonium qubits. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate flux-pulse-assisted readout, as proposed in Phys. Rev. Applied 22, 014079 (this https URL), in a setup without a quantum-limited parametric amplifier. Increasing the dispersive shift magnitude by almost 20% through flux pulsing, we achieve an assignment fidelity of 94.3% with an integration time of 280 ns. The readout performance is limited by state initialization, but we find that the limit imposed only by the signal-to-noise ratio corresponds to an assignment fidelity of 99.9% with a 360 ns integration time. We also verify these results through simple semi-classical simulations. These results constitute the fastest reported readout of a fluxonium qubit, with the prospect of further improvement by incorporation of a parametric amplifier in the readout chain to enhance measurement efficiency.