Erasure Qubits: Overcoming the T1 Limit in Superconducting Circuits

Aleksander Kubica, Arbel Haim, Yotam Vaknin, Harry Levine, Fernando Brandão, Alex Retzker

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

The amplitude-damping time T1 has long stood as the major factor limiting quantum fidelity in superconducting circuits, prompting concerted efforts in the material science and design of qubits aimed at increasing T1. In contrast, the dephasing time Tφ can usually be extended above T1 (via, e.g., dynamical decoupling) to the point where it does not limit fidelity. In this article, we propose a scheme for overcoming the conventional T1 limit on fidelity by designing qubits in a way that amplitude-damping errors can be detected and converted into erasure errors. Compared to standard qubit implementations, our scheme improves the performance of fault-tolerant protocols, as numerically demonstrated by the circuit-noise simulations of the surface code. We describe two simple qubit implementations with superconducting circuits and discuss procedures for detecting amplitude-damping errors, performing entangling gates, and extending Tφ. Our results suggest that engineering efforts should focus on improving Tφ and the quality of quantum coherent control, as they effectively become the limiting factor on the performance of fault-tolerant protocols.

Original languageAmerican English
Article number041022
JournalPhysical Review X
Volume13
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 2023

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Erasure Qubits: Overcoming the T1 Limit in Superconducting Circuits'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this