Coherent operation of gate-voltage-controlled hybrid transmon qubits (gatemons) based on semiconductor nanowires was recently demonstrated. Here we experimentally investigate the anharmonicity in epitaxial InAs-Al Josephson junctions, a key parameter for their use as a qubit. Anharmonicity is found to be reduced by roughly a factor of 2 compared to conventional metallic junctions and dependent on gate voltage. Experimental results are consistent with a theoretical model, indicating that Josephson coupling is mediated by a small number of highly transmitting modes in the semiconductor junction.
Gatemon qubits are the electrically tunable cousins of superconducting transmon qubits. In this work, we demonstrate the full coherent control of a gatemon qubit based on hole carriers in a Ge/Si core/shell nanowire, with the longest coherence times in group IV material gatemons to date. The key to these results is a high-quality Josephson junction obtained using a straightforward and reproducible annealing technique. We demonstrate that the transport through the narrow junction is dominated by only two quantum channels, with transparencies up to unity. This novel qubit platform holds great promise for quantum information applications, not only because it incorporates technologically relevant materials, but also because it provides new opportunities, like an ultrastrong spin-orbit coupling in the few-channel regime of Josephson junctions.
The anharmonicity of a transmon qubit, defined as the difference in energy level spacing, is a key design parameter. In transmons built from hybrid superconductor-semiconductor Josephson elements, the anharmonicity is tunable with gate voltages that control both the Josephson energy and the weak link transparency. In Sn-InAs nanowire transmons, we use two-tone microwave spectroscopy to extract anharmonicity ranging in absolute value from the transmon charging energy
Ec to values smaller than
Ec/10. This behavior contrasts with the predictions of the multi-channel short-junction model, which sets a lower limit on anharmonicity at
Ec/4. Coherent operation of the qubit is still possible at the point of the lowest anharmonicity. These findings demonstrate the potential of quantum circuits that benefit from widely electrically tunable anharmonicity.