Breaking the trade-off between fast control and long lifetime of a superconducting qubit

Abstract

The rapid development in designs and fabrication techniques of superconducting qubits has helped making coherence times of qubits longer. In the near future, however, the radiative decay of a qubit into its control line will be a fundamental limitation, imposing a trade-off between fast control and long lifetime of the qubit. In this work, we successfully break this trade-off by strongly coupling another superconducting qubit along the control line. This second qubit, which we call a Josephson quantum filter (JQF), prevents the qubit from emitting microwave photons and thus suppresses its relaxation, while faithfully transmitting large-amplitude control microwave pulses due to the saturation of the quantum filter, enabling fast qubit control. We observe an improvement of the qubit relaxation time without a reduction of the Rabi frequency. This device could potentially help in the realization of a large-scale superconducting quantum information processor in terms of the heating of the qubit environments and the crosstalk between qubits.