Dynamically protected erasure qubit via low-frequency charge driving

Dynamical protection via strong driving can enable resilient quantum processing on imperfect physical hardware. However, the practical utility of such schemes is frequently limited by parasitic processes such as drive-induced dephasing and leakage. Here, we demonstrate that sub-GHz charge driving of superconducting Kerr oscillators (KOs) in the transmon regime circumvents this trade-off, simultaneously activating fast parametric interactions and protecting the encoded qubit from low-frequency noise. The key is the frequency dependence of the charge sensitivity: using the AC Stark shift as a probe, we find that the KO frequency sensitivity to a charge drive grows quadratically with both drive frequency and amplitude, making the oscillator weakly sensitive to $1/f$ charge noise yet strongly coupled to drives near 1GHz. Exploiting this, we first demonstrate cooling and reset of the KO in 82ns, to a residual population below $0.7\%$---lower than its $2.5\%$ steady-state thermal population. Next, using two KOs, we demonstrate logical control and dynamical protection of a dual-rail qubit with nearly fourfold erasure bias. Finally, using a single end-of-circuit erasure check, we achieve an error per Clifford of $5.6\times10^{-4}$, which falls to $1.5\times10^{-4}$ after post-selection, with 25~ns gates.

Source: arXiv:2610.10432v1 - http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10432v1 PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.10432v1 Original Link: http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10432v1