Measurement of the Energy Relaxation Time in rf SQUID Flux Qubits

Abstract

It is well known that that superconducting qubits based on Josephson junctions have the advantages of scalability and the qubit states are easy to prepare and control. In addition, demonstration of Rabi oscillations in various superconducting circuits shows that superconducting qubits are promising for scalable quantum information processing. However, despite flexibility of design and fabrication, easier to scale up, and fast gate speed, superconducting qubits usually have much shorter decoherence time than trapped ions, NMR etc. due to the relatively strong interactions between qubits and environment. Recent experiments show that low frequency flux noise is the dominant mechanism of decoherence in superconducting flux qubits. However, despite extensive effort the origin of flux noise is still not well understood. The goal of this work is to identify the source and characterize the property of flux noisein rf SQUID flux qubit through various spectroscopy and time-resolved measurements. Our result show that one can determine all circuit parameters needed for reconstructing qubit Hamiltonian with high accuracy via measurement of macroscopic resonant tunneling (MRT) and photon assisted tunneling (PAT) and that the amount of flux noise in rf SQUID qubits scales linearly with self inductance of the qubits. In addition, we have investigated the dynamics of a three-level flux qubit in incoherent regime. The result demonstrates that treating a multi-level physical qubit, such as the superconducting flux qubit, as an ideal two-level quantum system may be inadequate under certain circumstances.