Parity-spin superconducting qubit based on topological insulators

Abstract

We propose to utilize two parity-protected qubits which are built based on superconductor/topological-insulator/superconductor (SC/TI/SC) Josephson junction to implement a parity-spin superconducting qubit. The SC/TI/SC Josephson junctions have identical Josephson potential, which is robust against fabrication variations and guarantees the reliable cos⁡2ϕ energy-phase relation for implementing a parity-protected qubit. By viewing the even and odd parity ground states of a single parity-protected qubit as spin- 12 states, we construct the logic qubit states using the total parity odd subspace of two parity-protected qubits, refereed to parity-spin qubit. This parity-spin qubit exhibits robustness against charge noise, similar to a singlet-triplet (S-T) qubit’s immunity to global magnetic field fluctuations. Meanwhile, the flux noise cannot directly couple two states with the same total parity and is significantly suppressed. Benefiting from the simultaneous protection from charge and flux noise, we demonstrate an enhancement of both T 1 and T 2 coherence times. Our work presents a TI-based approach to engineer symmetry-protected superconducting qubits.