The quasicharge superconducting qubit realizes the dual of the transmon and shows strong robustness to flux and charge fluctuations thanks to a very large inductance closed on a Josephsonjunction. At the same time, a weak anharmonicity of the spectrum is inherited from the parent transmon, that introduces leakage errors and is prone to frequency crowding in multi-qubit setups. We propose a novel design that employs a quartic superinductor and confers a good degree of anharmonicity to the spectrum. The quartic regime is achieved through a properly designed chain of Josephson junction loops that avoids strong quantum fluctuations without introducing a severe dependence on the external flux.
High fidelity quantum information processing requires a combination of fast gates and long-lived quantum memories. In this work, we propose a hybrid architecture, where a parity-protectedsuperconducting qubit is directly coupled to a Majorana qubit, which plays the role of a quantum memory. The superconducting qubit is based upon a π-periodic Josephson junction realized with gate-tunable semiconducting wires, where the tunneling of individual Cooper pairs is suppressed. One of the wires additionally contains four Majorana zero modes that define a qubit. We demonstrate that this enables the implementation of a SWAP gate, allowing for the transduction of quantum information between the topological and conventional qubit. This architecture combines fast gates, which can be realized with the superconducting qubit, with a topologically protected Majorana memory.
In superconducting circuits interrupted by Josephson junctions, the dependence of the energy spectrum on offset charges on different islands is 2e periodic through the Aharonov-Cashereffect and resembles a crystal band structure that reflects the symmetries of the Josephson potential. We show that higher-harmonic Josephson elements described by a cos(2φ) energy-phase relation provide an increased freedom to tailor the shape of the Josephson potential and design spectra featuring multiplets of flat bands and Dirac points in the charge Brillouin zone. Flat bands provide noise-insensitive quantum states, and band engineering can help improve the coherence of the system. We discuss a modified version of a flux qubit that achieves in principle no decoherence from charge noise and introduce a flux qutrit that shows a spin-one Dirac spectrum and is simultaneously quote robust to both charge and flux noise.