Amalie T. J. Paulsen | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Higher Josephson harmonics in a tunable double-junction transmon qubit

Tunable Josephson harmonics open new avenues for qubit design. We demonstrate a superconducting circuit element consisting of a tunnel junction in series with a SQUID loop, yielding a Josephson potential whose harmonic content is strongly tunable by magnetic flux. Through spectroscopy of the first four qubit transitions, together with an effective single-mode model renormalized by the internal mode, we resolve a second harmonic with an amplitude up to $\sim10\%$ of the fundamental. We identify a flux sweet spot where the dispersive shift vanishes, achieved by balancing the dispersive couplings to the internal and qubit modes. This highly tunable element provides a route toward protected qubits and customizable nonlinear microwave devices.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Junction-Intrinsic Dissipation in Hybrid Superconductor-Semiconductor Gatemon Qubits

Superconducting transmon qubits based on hybrid superconductor-semiconductor Josephson junctions (gatemons) offer gate tunability, but their relaxation times remain well below those of state-of-the-art transmons, and the origin of this discrepancy is not fully understood. Here, we co-fabricate gatemons and SIS-junction transmons with nominally identical circuit layouts, gate dielectrics, and control lines, so that the Josephson element is the only intentional distinction. Across multiple chips, transmons in this architecture reach relaxation times in the tens of microseconds, whereas gatemons saturate in the few-microsecond range. Using the transmons as on-chip references, we construct a loss budget including Purcell decay, spontaneous emission through the control line, and internal dielectric loss, and find that the corresponding T1 limits exceed all measured gatemon values by more than an order of magnitude. Temperature-dependent T1 measurements follow a common quasiparticle-activation model and yield similar superconducting gaps for S-Sm-S and SIS junctions, indicating that the reduced gatemon coherence is dominated by additional temperature-independent, junction-intrinsic dissipation.

quant-ph↗