Mitigating Capacitive Loading Enables Fast Two-Qubit Gates in Highly Connected Fluxonium Quantum Processors

Abstract

Fluxonium qubits combine long coherence times with strong anharmonicity, making them attractive for scalable superconducting quantum processors. Recent experiments have demonstrated high-fidelity two-qubit gates and multi-qubit entanglement in one-dimensional and connectivity-four fluxonium processors, motivating their extension to highly connected two-dimensional (2D) architectures. A central challenge in this extension is to achieve strong coupling to multiple circuit elements while preserving the finite capacitance budget of fluxonium qubits, which constrains the attainable qubit-qubit effective coupling strength and, consequently, two-qubit gate performance. Here, we establish a unified theoretical framework that identifies the connectivity-dependent upper bound on capacitive coupling and quantifies its reduction by distinct parasitic-capacitance channels, applicable across both fluxonium and transmon regimes. We show that pad-to-ground loading is primarily geometry limited and can be substantially suppressed through qubit-pad engineering, whereas inter-pad loading is ultimately constrained by parasitic capacitances of Josephson junctions and Josephson junction arrays. Building on these insights, we formulate practical design principles and numerically demonstrate two-qubit gates as fast as 27 ns and leakage-induced infidelity below $10^{-3}$ under representative fabrication variations in 2D fluxonium architectures. These results establish a quantitative framework for understanding and mitigating capacitive loading, suggesting that it does not impose a fundamental performance limit on highly connected fluxonium processors.