The Floquet Fluxonium Molecule: Driving Down Dephasing in Coupled Superconducting Qubits

High-coherence qubits, which can store and manipulate quantum states for long times with low error rates, are necessary building blocks for quantum computers. Here we propose a driven superconducting erasure qubit, the Floquet fluxonium molecule, which minimizes bit-flip rates through disjoint support of its qubit states and suppresses phase flips by a novel second-order insensitivity to flux-noise dephasing. We estimate the bit-flip, phase-flip, and erasure rates through numerical simulations, with predicted coherence times of approximately 50 ms in the computational subspace and erasure lifetimes of about <a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline" overflow="scroll"><a:mn>500</a:mn><a:mspace width="0.2em"/><a:mtext fontfamily="times">μ</a:mtext><a:mrow><a:mi mathvariant="normal">s</a:mi></a:mrow></a:math>. We also present a protocol for performing high-fidelity single-qubit rotation gates via additional flux modulation, on timescales of roughly 500 ns, and propose a scheme for erasure detection and logical readout. Our results demonstrate the utility of drives for building new qubits that can outperform their static counterparts. Published by the American Physical Society 2024