Engineered two-photon dissipative confinement of a Kerr-cat qubit using SISIS quantum circuit refrigerator
Shumpei Masuda, Tsuyoshi Yamamoto, Shuji Nakamura +2 more
Kerr-cat qubits realized in periodically driven superconducting nonlinear resonators are a promising platform for quantum information processing with biased noise. Pure dephasing in such systems induces leakage out of the qubit subspace, motivating the use of quantum circuit refrigeration (QCR) to remove excess excitations. While conventional superconductor--insulator--normal-metal--insulator--superconductor (SINIS)-based QCRs can suppress leakage via single-photon absorption, they also enhance QCR-induced phase-flip errors. Here we investigate a QCR based on a superconductor--insulator--superconductor--insulator--superconductor (SISIS) junction coupled to a Kerr parametric oscillator (KPO). We show that a SISIS-based QCR can operate in a regime where single-photon processes are suppressed while two-photon absorption dominates. As a result, the proposed SISIS-based QCR achieves strong suppression of dephasing-induced leakage while substantially reducing the increase in phase-flip errors associated with QCR operation. These results demonstrate that the proposed SISIS-based QCR provides an effective approach for mitigating leakage while limiting QCR-induced phase-flip errors in Kerr-cat qubits.
quant-pharXiv:2609.11034•Sep 11, 2026•0 citations