A high degree of quantum coherence is a crucial requirement for the implementation of quantum logic devices. Solid state nanodevices seem particularly promising from the point of view of integrability and flexibility in the design. However decoherence is a serious limitation, due to the presence of many types low energy excitations in the ``internal'' environment and of ``external'' sources due to the control circuitery. Here we study both kind of dephasing in a special implementation, the charge Josephson qubit, however many of our results are applicable to a large class of solid state qubits. This is the case of 1/f noise for which we introduce and study a model of an environment of bistable fluctuatiors. External sources of noise are analized in terms of a suitable harmonic oscillator environment and the explicit mapping on the spin boson model is presented. We perform a detailed investigation of various computation procedures (single shot measurements, repeated measurements) and discuss the problem of the information needed to characterize the effect of the environment. For a fluctuator environment with 1/f spectrum memory effects turn out to be important. Although in general information beyond the power spectrum is needed, in many situations this results in the knowledge of only one more microscopic parameter of the environment. This allows to determine which degrees of freedom of the environment are effective sources of decoherence in each different physical situation considered.
We study the decoherence and the quantum measurement of charge in a qubit consisting of a circular array of Josephson junctions. The two-level system we consider couples the two charge states through a higher-order tunneling process thus making it possible to achieve a long relaxation time. Using the spin-boson Hamiltonian, we estimate decoherence due to ohmic as well as
1/f noise. We simulate the quantum-mechanical measurement process by studying the density matrix of the qubit and a capacitively coupled single-electron transistor that measures the charge.
In this lectures, we have described some essential features of loss of coherence by a qubit coupled to the environment. We have first presented well known semiclassical arguments that relate both decoherence and relaxation to the environmental noise. Then we have shown that models with pure decoherence (but no relaxation in qubit states) can be exactly solvable. As an example, we have treated in detail the model of fluctuating background charges which is believed to describe one of the most important channels for decoherence for the charge Josephson junction qubit. We have shown that the decoherence rate saturates at `high' temperatures while becoming linear in T at low temperatures and showing in all regimes a non-monotonic behaviour as a function of the coupling of the qubit to the fluctuating background charges. We have also considered, albeit only perturbatively, the qubit relaxation by the background charges and demonstrated that a quasi-linear behaviour of the spectral density of noise deduced from the measurements of the relaxation rate can be qualitatively explained.
In this paper, we propose a technique to characterise the energy level structure of a superconducting charge qubit. The technique relies on the backreaction of a solid-state qubit on its environment and the incoherent transfer of energy from a high frequency mode to a low frequency mode due to the stochastic transitions of the qubit between energy eigenstates. We consider a coupled system consisting of a model charge qubit and several classical degrees of freedom. The qubit is coupled to three electromagnetic modes: a low frequency bias field, a higher frequency mode (which is used to pump the qubit from the ground state to an excited state), and a lossy reservoir (which represents the cavity that contains the qubit and control fields). The reservoir provides a mechanism to allow the qubit to dissipate energy and to induce spontaneous decays from an excited state into the ground state. We show that these spontaneous decays can have a significant effect on the noise in the classical bias field, and that this noise can be used to characterise the energy level structure of the qubit.
We compute the decoherence caused by
1∕f fluctuations at low frequency
f in the critical current
I0 of Josephson junctions incorporated into flux, phase, charge, and hybrid flux-charge superconducting quantum bits (qubits). The dephasing time ${\ensuremath{\tau}}_{\ensuremath{\phi}}$ scales as ${I}_{0}∕\ensuremath{\Omega}\ensuremath{\Lambda}{S}_{{I}_{0}}^{1∕2}(1\phantom{\rule{0.3em}{0ex}}\mathrm{Hz})$, where $\ensuremath{\Omega}∕2\ensuremath{\pi}$ is the energy-level splitting frequency,
SI0(1Hz) is the spectral density of the critical-current noise at
1Hz, and $\ensuremath{\Lambda}\ensuremath{\equiv}\ensuremath{\mid}{I}_{0}d\ensuremath{\Omega}∕\ensuremath{\Omega}d{I}_{0}\ensuremath{\mid}$ is a parameter computed for given parameters for each type of qubit that specifies the sensitivity of the level splitting to critical-current fluctuations. Computer simulations show that the envelope of the coherent oscillations of any qubit after time
t scales as $\mathrm{exp}(\ensuremath{-}{t}^{2}∕2{\ensuremath{\tau}}_{\ensuremath{\phi}}^{2})$ when the dephasing due to critical-current noise dominates the dephasing from all sources of dissipation. We compile published results for fluctuations in the critical current of Josephson tunnel junctions fabricated with different technologies and a wide range in
I0 and area
A, and show that their values of
SI0(1Hz) scale to within a factor of 3 of $[144{({I}_{0}∕\ensuremath{\mu}\mathrm{A})}^{2}∕(\mathcal{A}∕\ensuremath{\mu}{\mathrm{m}}^{2})]{(\mathrm{pA})}^{2}∕\mathrm{Hz}$ at
4.2K. We empirically extrapolate
SI01∕2(1Hz) to lower temperatures using a scaling
T(K)∕4.2. Using this result, we find that the predicted values of ${\ensuremath{\tau}}_{\ensuremath{\phi}}$ at
100mK range from $0.8\phantom{\rule{0.5em}{0ex}}\text{to}\phantom{\rule{0.5em}{0ex}}12\phantom{\rule{0.3em}{0ex}}\ensuremath{\mu}\mathrm{s}$, and are usually substantially longer than values measured experimentally at lower temperatures.
In quantum computation, quantum coherence must be maintained during gate operation. However, in physical implementations, various couplings with the environment are unavoidable and can lead to a dephasing of a quantum bit (qubit). The background charge fluctuations are an important dephasing process, especially in a charge qubit system. We examined the dephasing rate of a qubit due to random telegraph noise. Solving stochastic differential equations, we obtained the dephasing rate of a qubit constructed of a coupled-dot system; we applied our results to the charge Josephson qubit system. We examined the dephasing rates due to two types of couplings between the coupled-dot system and the background charge, namely, fluctuation in the tunnel coupling constant and fluctuation in the asymmetric bias. For a strong-coupling condition, the dephasing rate was inversely proportional to the time constant of the telegraph noise. When there is fluctuation in the tunnel coupling constant, Gaussian decay occurs in the initial regime. We also examined the rate of dephasing due to many impurity sites. For a weak-coupling condition with fluctuation in the asymmetric bias, the obtained dephasing rate coincided with that obtained by the perturbation method using the spectral weight of a boson thermal bath, which is proportional to the inverse of the frequency.