Enhancing qubit coherence using Floquet physics
Abstract: High-coherence qubits, which can store and manipulate quantum states for long times with low error rates, are necessary building blocks for quantum computers. Significant theoretical and experimental effort has been devoted to creating protected qubits with high coherence, but no prior proposal has ultimately delivered significant real-world coherence gains over more standard qubit designs. In this talk, I will discuss our recent proposal for a novel protected qubit architecture which uses a Floquet flux drive to dramatically extend the coherence of a simple static superconducting circuit. The computational eigenstates have two key properties: disjoint support to minimize bit flips, along with first- and second-order insensitivity to flux noise dephasing. The rates of the three main error types are estimated through numerical simulations, with predicted coherence times of approximately 50 ms in the computational subspace and erasure lifetimes of about 500 μs.
Student Bio: Matt Thibodeau is a 5th year student in Bryan Clark’s research group, working on simulation of device physics as well as quantum simulation more