Phonon- and magnon-mediated decoherence of a magnonic qubit

We investigate the decoherence of magnonic qubits in small ferromagnetic insulators and compute the relaxation and dephasing rates due to magnon-phonon and magnon-magnon interactions. We combine a Bloch-Redfield description with Keldysh nonequilibrium field theory to find explicit expressions for the rates. For a quadratic dispersion and assuming a uniform mode defines the qubit, we find that decay into two phonons is the only allowed relaxation process at zero temperature. The low resonance frequency and heavy unit cell strongly suppress this process in yttrium iron garnet. We also find that the dephasing rate scales with the inverse of size and damping of the magnet and could become large for small and clean magnets. Our calculation thus provides additional insight into the viability of magnon-based quantum devices.