Non-degenerate noise-resilient superconducting qubit

  1. Max Hays,
  2. Junghyun Kim,
  3. and William D. Oliver
We propose a superconducting qubit based on engineering the first and second harmonics of the Josephson energy and phase relation EJ1cosφ and EJ2cos2φ. By constructing a circuit such
that EJ2 is negative and |EJ1|≪|EJ2|, we create a periodic potential with two non-degenerate minima. The qubit, which we dub „harmonium“, is formed from the lowest-energy states of each minimum. Bit-flip protection of the qubit arises due to the localization of each qubit state to their respective minima, while phase-flip protection can be understood by considering the circuit within the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. We demonstrate with time-domain simulations that single- and two-qubit gates can be performed in approximately one hundred nanoseconds. Finally, we compute the qubit coherence times using numerical diagonalization of the complete circuit in conjunction with state-of-the-art noise models. We estimate out-of-manifold heating times on the order of milliseconds, which can be treated as erasure errors using conventional dispersive readout. We estimate pure-dephasing times on the order of many tens of milliseconds, and bit-flip times on the order of seconds.