Singlet-only always-on gapless exchange (SAGE) spin qubits are an alternative type of exchange-only (EO) qubits that encode a single qubit in the spins of four electrons located in four tunnel-coupled quantum dots. While conventional EO qubits are susceptible to local magnetic field gradients caused by local nuclear environments and
g-factor variations, the SAGE qubit subspace is inherently protected from magnetic-gradient-induced Pauli errors by virtue of the singlet-only encoding, which is invariant under magnetic field gradients, and the always-on exchange couplings, which provide energetic leakage protection. However, the always-on operation simultaneously increases the qubit's sensitivity to charge noise. Here, starting from a Hubbard model describing the underlying electronic structure of the coupled quantum dots, we characterize the performance of SAGE qubits in the presence of
1/f charge noise that induces fluctuations in both the dot chemical potentials and the interdot tunnel couplings. We calculate SAGE idle coherence times and show that realistic CPMG-like pulse sequences can be used to significantly extend SAGE single-qubit coherence times for experimentally relevant charge noise strengths. We likewise study the fidelity of SAGE two-qubit gates in the presence of charge and magnetic noise and again propose a simple refocusing strategy to mitigate the noise, while increased ramp times of the entangling pulse suppress leakage into noncomputational states.
We propose a singlet-only always-on gapless exchange (SAGE) spin qubit that encodes a single qubit in the spins of four electrons while allowing universal baseband control. While conventional exchange-only qubits suffer from magnetic-field-gradient-induced leakage and coherent errors due to local nuclear environments and variations in the g-factor, the SAGE qubit subspace is protected from coherent errors due to local magnetic field gradients, and leakage out of the computational subspace is energetically suppressed due to the exchange interactions between electrons being always on. Consequently, we find that when magnetic gradient noise dominates over charge noise, coherence times and single-qubit gate infidelities of the SAGE qubit improve by an order of magnitude compared to conventional exchange-only qubits. Moreover, using realistic parameters, two-qubit gates can be performed with a single interqubit exchange pulse with times comparable in duration to conventional exchange-only qubits but with a significantly simplified pulse sequence.
We analyze a simple exchange-based two-qubit gate for singlet-triplet qubits in gate-defined semiconductor quantum dots that can be implemented in a single exchange pulse. Excitations from the logical subspace are suppressed by a magnetic field gradient that causes spin-flip transitions to be non-energy-conserving. We show that the use of adiabatic pulses greatly reduces leakage processes comapred to square pulses. We also characterize the effect of charge noise on the entanglement fidelity of the gate both analytically and in simulations; demonstrating high entanglement fidelities for physically realistic experimental parameters. Specifically we find that it is possible to achieve fidelities and gate times that are comparable to single-qubit states using realistic magnetic field gradients.