This work deals with two pressing issues in the design and operation of Josephson qubits -- loss of coherence and measurement. (Longer abstract follows in the work.)
Dielectric loss from two-level states is shown to be a dominant decoherence source in superconducting quantum bits. Depending on the qubit design, dielectric loss from insulating materials or the tunnel junction can lead to short coherence times. We show that a variety of microwave and qubit measurements are well modeled by loss from resonant absorption of two-level defects. Our results demonstrate that this loss can be significantly reduced by using better dielectrics and fabricating junctions of small area . With a redesigned phase qubit employing low-loss dielectrics, the energy relaxation rate has been improved by a factor of 20, opening up the possibility of multiqubit gates and algorithms.
We have designed and operated a circuit based on a large-area current-biased Josephson junction whose two lowest energy quantum levels are used to implement a solid-state qubit. The circuit allows measurement of the qubit states with a fidelity of 85% while providing sufficient decoupling from external sources of relaxation and decoherence to allow coherent manipulation of the qubit state, as demonstrated by the observation of Rabi oscillations. This qubit circuit is the basis of a scalable quantum computer.
Dielectric loss from two-level systems (TLSs) formed by local defects have shown a significant impact on the qubit coherence time. These defects can originate in the insulation material for superconducting wires isolation or in the Josephson junction tunnel barrier material. Due to the complexity of the qubit circuit fabrication process, identifying the contribution from each decoherence source is challenging. In an effort to address this issue, we have developed superconducting qubit that consists of full epitaxially-grown NbN/AlN/NbN Josephson junctions in NbN coplanar waveguide (CPW) resonator circuit. The dielectric loss introduced from TLFs in tunnel junction barrier has been largely reduced due to the unique epitaxial feature of the tunnel junction. The quality factor Qi of the CPW resonator was measured and the dielectric loss tanδ is 3×10−4. The relaxation time inferred from the measured resonator quality factor was comparable to the qubit relaxation time.