PME Special Quantum Seminar: Harry Levine, AWS Center for Quantum Computing

Quantum error correction with erasure qubits promises significant advantages over standard error correction due to favorable thresholds for erasure errors. To realize this advantage in practice requires a qubit for which nearly all errors are such erasure errors, and the ability to check for erasure errors without dephasing the qubit. We demonstrate that a “dual-rail qubit” consisting of a pair of resonantly-coupled transmons can form a highly coherent erasure qubit, where transmon T1 errors are converted into erasure errors and residual dephasing is strongly suppressed, leading to millisecond-scale coherence within the qubit subspace. We show that single-qubit gates are limited primarily by erasure errors (0.219(2)% per gate) while the residual error rates are ~ 40 times lower. We further demonstrate mid- circuit detection of erasure errors while introducing < 0.1% dephasing error per check. Finally, we show that the suppression of transmon noise allows this dual-rail qubit to preserve high coherence over a broad tunable operating range, offering an improved capacity to avoid frequency collisions. This work establishes transmon-based dual-rail qubits as an attractive building block for hardware-efficient quantum error correction.