Flux noise in disordered spin systems

Abstract

Impurity spins randomly distributed at the surfaces and interfaces of superconducting wires are known to cause flux noise in Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices, providing a mechanism for decoherence in superconducting qubits. While flux noise is well characterised experimentally, the microscopic model underlying spin dynamics remains unknown. First-principles theories are too computationally expensive to capture spin diffusion over large length scales, third-principles approaches lump spin dynamics into a single phenomenological spin-diffusion operator that is not able to describe the quantum noise regime and connect to microscopic models and disorder scenarios. Here we propose an intermediate "second principles" method to describe general spin dissipation and flux noise in the quantum regime. It leads to the interpretation that flux noise arises from the density of paramagnon excitations at the edge of the wire, with paramagnon-paramagnon interactions leading to spin diffusion, and interactions between paramagnons and other degrees of freedom leading to spin energy relaxation. At high frequency we obtain an upper bound for flux noise, showing that the (super)Ohmic noise observed in experiments does not originate from interacting spin impurities. We apply the method to Heisenberg models in two dimensional square lattices with random distribution of vacancies and nearest-neighbour spins coupled by constant exchange. Numerical calculations of flux noise show that it follows the observed power law $A/\omega^{\alpha}$, with amplitude $A$ and exponent $\alpha$ depending on temperature and inhomogeneities. These results are compared to experiments in niobium and aluminium devices. The method establishes a connection between flux noise experiments and microscopic Hamiltonians identifying relevant microscopic mechanisms and guiding strategies for reducing flux noise.