Superconducting qubits capable of dynamic switching between protected and high-speed control regimes

An ideal quantum computer relies on qubits capable of performing fast gate operations and maintaining strong interconnections while preserving their quantum coherence. Since the inception of experimental eforts toward building a quantum computer, the community has faced challenges in engineering such a system. Among the various methods of implementing a quantum computer, superconducting qubits have shown fast gates close to tens of nanoseconds, with the state-of-the-art reaching a coherence of a few milliseconds. However, achieving simultaneously long lifetimes with fast qubit operations poses an inherent paradox. Qubits with high coherence require isolation from the environment, while fast operation necessitates strong coupling of the qubit. This thesis approaches this issue by proposing the idea of engineering superconducting qubits capable of transitioning between operating in a protected regime, where the qubit is completely isolated from the environment, and coupling to the communication channels as needed. In this direction, we use the geometric superinductor to scan the parameter space of rf-SQUID devices, searching for a regime where we can take the qubit protection to its extreme. This leads us to the inductively shunted transmon (IST) regime, characterized by EJ /EC ≫ 1 and EJ /EL ≫ 1, where the circuit potential exhibits a double well with a large barrier separating the local ground states of each quantum well. In this regime, although it is anticipated that the two quantum wells would be isolated from each other, we observe single fuxon tunneling between them. The interplay of the cavity photons and the fuxon transition forms a rich physical system, containing resonance conditions that allow the preparation of the fuxon ground or excited states. This enables us to study the relaxation rate of such transition and show that it can be as large as 3.6 hours. Dynamically controlling the barrier height between the two quantum wells allows for controllable coupling, which scales exponentially, for a qubit encoded in two fuxon states. The 0-π qubit is one of the very few known superconducting circuit types that ofers exponential protection from both relaxation and dephasing simultaneously. However, this qubit is not exempt from the fact that such protection comes at the expense of complex readout and control. In this thesis, we propose a way to controllably break the circuit symmetry, the key reason for the protection, to momentarily restore the ability to control and manipulate the qubit. An asymmetry in capacitances and inductances in the 0-π circuit is detrimental since they lead to coupling of the protected state to the thermally occupied parasitic mode of the circuit. However, here we try to exploit a controlled asymmetry in Josephson energies and show that this can be used as a tunable coupler between the protected states. In the future, this should allow to perform gate operations by dynamically controlling the asymmetry instead of driving the protected transition with microwave pulses. Therefore, we believe that the proposed method can make the use of protected qubits more practical in experimental realizations of quantum computing.