- Open Access
Erasure Conversion in Integer Fluxonium Qubits
PRX Quantum 7, 020339 – Published 27 May, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/jszm-48h7
Abstract
We propose an erasure conversion scheme on the and qubits in integer fluxonium qubits (IFQs), which are both first-order insensitive to flux noise. The transition is identical to that of a usual fluxonium qubit and hence is expected to have excellent coherence time, while the transition is additionally protected from the energy relaxation by the parity symmetry. The dominant error in both qubits arises due to the energy relaxation: from to in the e-f qubit and from to in the g-f qubit. Such errors can be treated as erasure events, and their efficient detection improves the performance of quantum error-correcting codes. We consider a protocol for such erasure conversion based on the dispersive readout. Our main finding is that, with proper circuit parameter choice, carefully designed gate sets, and the integration of erasure conversion, IFQs promise highly effective coherence times.
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
Popular Summary
Quantum error correction is crucial for building reliable quantum computers, and having information on the space-time location of errors can significantly reduce the required hardware resources. We show that a standard superconducting fluxonium circuit can function as an “erasure qubit” when the second excited state is used to encode the qubit. In certain circuit parameter regimes, the computational subspace can be highly coherent, and the dominant error is the leakage out of the computational subspace. The detection of such leakage can be done using a coupled readout resonator, yet this detection operation does not ruin the quantum information if a leakage event did not happen. Using a single-mode circuit as a superconducting erasure qubit helps simplify the hardware needed for error correction and fault-tolerant quantum computing.
Article Text
References (86)
- J. P. Bonilla Ataides, D. K. Tuckett, S. D. Bartlett, S. T. Flammia, and B. J. Brown, The XZZX surface code, Nat. Commun. 12, 2172 (2021).
- S. Puri, L. St-Jean, J. A. Gross, A. Grimm, N. E. Frattini, P. S. Iyer, A. Krishna, S. Touzard, L. Jiang, A. Blais, et al., Bias-preserving gates with stabilized cat qubits, Sci. Adv. 6, eaay5901 (2020).
- I. Cong, H. Levine, A. Keesling, D. Bluvstein, S.-T. Wang, and M. D. Lukin, Hardware-efficient, fault-tolerant quantum computation with Rydberg atoms, Phys. Rev. X 12, 021049 (2022).
- D. Gottesman, Stabilizer Codes and Quantum Error Correction (California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, 1997).
- M. Grassl, T. Beth, and T. Pellizzari, Codes for the quantum erasure channel, Phys. Rev. A 56, 33 (1997).
- T. M. Stace, S. D. Barrett, and A. C. Doherty, Thresholds for topological codes in the presence of loss, Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 200501 (2009).
- Y. Wu, S. Kolkowitz, S. Puri, and J. D. Thompson, Erasure conversion for fault-tolerant quantum computing in alkaline earth Rydberg atom arrays, Nat. Commun. 13, 4657 (2022).
- K. Sahay, J. Jin, J. Claes, J. D. Thompson, and S. Puri, High-threshold codes for neutral-atom qubits with biased erasure errors, Phys. Rev. X 13, 041013 (2023).
- A. Kubica, A. Haim, Y. Vaknin, H. Levine, F. Brandão, and A. Retzker, Erasure qubits: Overcoming the limit in superconducting circuits, Phys. Rev. X 13, 041022 (2023).
- M. Kang, W. C. Campbell, and K. R. Brown, Quantum error correction with metastable states of trapped ions using erasure conversion, PRX Quantum 4, 020358 (2023).
- S. Gu, Y. Vaknin, A. Retzker, and A. Kubica, Optimizing quantum error correction protocols with erasure qubits, PRX Quantum 6, 040354 (2025).
- K. Chang, S. Singh, J. Claes, K. Sahay, J. Teoh, and S. Puri, Surface code with imperfect erasure checks, PRX Quantum 6, 040355 (2025).
- S. Ma, G. Liu, P. Peng, B. Zhang, S. Jandura, J. Claes, A. P. Burgers, G. Pupillo, S. Puri, and J. D. Thompson, High-fidelity gates and mid-circuit erasure conversion in an atomic qubit, Nature 622, 279 (2023).
- H. Levine et al., Demonstrating a long-coherence dual-rail erasure qubit using tunable transmons, Phys. Rev. X 14, 011051 (2024).
- K. S. Chou, T. Shemma, H. McCarrick, T.-C. Chien, J. D. Teoh, P. Winkel, A. Anderson, J. Chen, J. C. Curtis, S. J. de Graaf, et al., A superconducting dual-rail cavity qubit with erasure-detected logical measurements, Nat. Phys. 20, 1454 (2024).
- M. Thibodeau, A. Kou, and B. K. Clark, The Floquet fluxonium molecule: Driving down dephasing in coupled superconducting qubits, PRX Quantum 5, 040314 (2024).
- A. Koottandavida, I. Tsioutsios, A. Kargioti, C. R. Smith, V. R. Joshi, W. Dai, J. D. Teoh, J. C. Curtis, L. Frunzio, R. J. Schoelkopf, and M. H. Devoret, Erasure detection of a dual-rail qubit encoded in a double-post superconducting cavity, Phys. Rev. Lett. 132, 180601 (2024).
- S. Kumar, X. You, X. Croot, T. Zhao, D. Chen, S. Sussman, A. Premkumar, J. Bryon, J. Koch, and A. A. Houck, Protomon: A multimode qubit in the fluxonium molecule, arXiv:2411.16648.
- A. M. Kubica and A. Retzker, Heralding of amplitude damping decay noise for quantum error correction, U.S. Patent 11,748,652 (2023).
- L. B. Nguyen, G. Koolstra, Y. Kim, A. Morvan, T. Chistolini, S. Singh, K. N. Nesterov, C. Jünger, L. Chen, Z. Pedramrazi, B. K. Mitchell, J. M. Kreikebaum, S. Puri, D. I. Santiago, and I. Siddiqi, Blueprint for a high-performance fluxonium quantum processor, PRX Quantum 3, 037001 (2022).
- R. A. Mencia, W.-J. Lin, H. Cho, M. G. Vavilov, and V. E. Manucharyan, Integer fluxonium qubit, PRX Quantum 5, 040318 (2024).
- W. Ardati, S. Léger, S. Kumar, V. N. Suresh, D. Nicolas, C. Mori, F. D’Esposito, T. Vakhtel, O. Buisson, Q. Ficheux, and N. Roch, Using bifluxon tunneling to protect the fluxonium qubit, Phys. Rev. X 14, 041014 (2024).
- R. A. Mencia, Ultra-high impedance superconducting circuits, Ph.D. thesis, University of Maryland, College Park (2023).
- H. Putterman, K. Noh, C. T. Hann, G. S. MacCabe, S. Aghaeimeibodi, R. N. Patel, M. Lee, W. M. Jones, H. Moradinejad, R. Rodriguez, et al., Hardware-efficient quantum error correction using concatenated Bosonic qubits, Nature 638, 927 (2025).
- Q. Ficheux, L. B. Nguyen, A. Somoroff, H. Xiong, K. N. Nesterov, M. G. Vavilov, and V. E. Manucharyan, Fast logic with slow qubits: Microwave-activated controlled-z gate on low-frequency fluxoniums, Phys. Rev. X 11, 021026 (2021).
- L. Ding, M. Hays, Y. Sung, B. Kannan, J. An, A. Di Paolo, A. H. Karamlou, T. M. Hazard, K. Azar, D. K. Kim, B. M. Niedzielski, A. Melville, M. E. Schwartz, J. L. Yoder, T. P. Orlando, S. Gustavsson, J. A. Grover, K. Serniak, and W. D. Oliver, High-fidelity, frequency-flexible two-qubit fluxonium gates with a transmon coupler, Phys. Rev. X 13, 031035 (2023).
- J.-H. Wang, H. Xiong, J.-Z. Yang, H.-Y. Zhang, Y.-P. Song, and L.-M. Duan, Transmon-assisted high-fidelity controlled- gates for integer fluxonium qubits, Phys. Rev. Appl. 24, 034044 (2025).
- E. Dogan, D. Rosenstock, L. Le Guevel, H. Xiong, R. A. Mencia, A. Somoroff, K. N. Nesterov, M. G. Vavilov, V. E. Manucharyan, and C. Wang, Two-fluxonium cross-resonance gate, Phys. Rev. Appl. 20, 024011 (2023).
- K. N. Nesterov, C. Wang, V. E. Manucharyan, and M. G. Vavilov, CNOT gates for fluxonium qubits via selective darkening of transitions, Phys. Rev. Appl. 18, 034063 (2022).
- W.-J. Lin, H. Cho, Y. Chen, M. G. Vavilov, C. Wang, and V. E. Manucharyan, 24 days-stable CNOT-gate on fluxonium qubits with over 99.9% fidelity, PRX Quantum 6, 010349 (2025).
- P. De Groot, J. Lisenfeld, R. Schouten, S. Ashhab, A. Lupaşcu, C. Harmans, and J. Mooij, Selective darkening of degenerate transitions demonstrated with two superconducting quantum bits, Nat. Phys. 6, 763 (2010).
- P. De Groot, S. Ashhab, A. Lupaşcu, L. DiCarlo, F. Nori, C. Harmans, and J. Mooij, Selective darkening of degenerate transitions for implementing quantum controlled-not gates, New J. Phys. 14, 073038 (2012).
- A. Kandala, K. X. Wei, S. Srinivasan, E. Magesan, S. Carnevale, G. A. Keefe, D. Klaus, O. Dial, and D. C. McKay, Demonstration of a high-fidelity CNOT gate for fixed-frequency transmons with engineered suppression, Phys. Rev. Lett. 127, 130501 (2021).
- K. X. Wei, E. Magesan, I. Lauer, S. Srinivasan, D. F. Bogorin, S. Carnevale, G. A. Keefe, Y. Kim, D. Klaus, W. Landers, N. Sundaresan, C. Wang, E. J. Zhang, M. Steffen, O. E. Dial, D. C. McKay, and A. Kandala, Hamiltonian engineering with multicolor drives for fast entangling gates and quantum crosstalk cancellation, Phys. Rev. Lett. 129, 060501 (2022).
- P. Jurcevic, A. Javadi-Abhari, L. S. Bishop, I. Lauer, D. F. Bogorin, M. Brink, L. Capelluto, O. Günlük, T. Itoko, N. Kanazawa, et al., Demonstration of quantum volume 64 on a superconducting quantum computing system, Quantum Sci. Technol. 6, 025020 (2021).
- M. Malekakhlagh and E. Magesan, Mitigating off-resonant error in the cross-resonance gate, Phys. Rev. A 105, 012602 (2022).
- C. Liu, Y. Li, J. Wang, Q. Guan, L. Jin, L. Ma, R. Hu, T. Wang, X. Zhu, H.-F. Yu, C. Deng, and X. Ma, Converting qubit relaxation into erasures with a single fluxonium, arXiv:2601.11086 [quant-ph].
- J. An, H. Zhang, M. Hays, J. Kim, I. T. Rosen, D. A. Rower, K. Azar, J. M. Gertler, M. Gingras, T. M. Hazard, B. M. Niedzielski, H. M. Stickler, M. E. Schwartz, J. I. J. Wang, T. P. Orlando, S. Gustavsson, J. A. Grover, K. Serniak, and W. D. Oliver, in Presented at the APS Global Physics Summit 2025, Session MAR-L17 (American Physical Society, College Park, MD, 2025), https://meetings-archive.aps.org/smt/2025/mar-l17/13/.
- J. An, H. Zhang, M. Hays, J. Kim, I. Rosen, D. Rower, K. Azar, J. Gertler, M. Gingras, T. Hazard, B. Niedzielski, M. Randeria, H. Stickler, M. Schwartz, J. Wang, T. Orlando, S. Gustavsson, J. Grover, K. Serniak, and W. Oliver, in Presented at the APS Global Physics Summit 2026, Session MAR-C04 (American Physical Society, College Park, MD, 2026), https://summit.aps.org/events/MAR-C04/1.
- D. L. Campbell, Y.-P. Shim, B. Kannan, R. Winik, D. K. Kim, A. Melville, B. M. Niedzielski, J. L. Yoder, C. Tahan, S. Gustavsson, and W. D. Oliver, Universal nonadiabatic control of small-gap superconducting qubits, Phys. Rev. X 10, 041051 (2020).
- H. Zhang, S. Chakram, T. Roy, N. Earnest, Y. Lu, Z. Huang, D. K. Weiss, J. Koch, and D. I. Schuster, Universal fast-flux control of a coherent, low-frequency qubit, Phys. Rev. X 11, 011010 (2021).
- D. A. Rower, L. Ding, H. Zhang, M. Hays, J. An, P. M. Harrington, I. T. Rosen, J. M. Gertler, T. M. Hazard, B. M. Niedzielski, M. E. Schwartz, S. Gustavsson, K. Serniak, J. A. Grover, and W. D. Oliver, Suppressing counter-rotating errors for fast single-qubit gates with fluxonium, PRX Quantum 5, 040342 (2024).
- B. Chiaro and Y. Zhang, Active leakage cancellation in single qubit gates, Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 130601 (2025).
- L. Henriet, L. Beguin, A. Signoles, T. Lahaye, A. Browaeys, G.-O. Reymond, and C. Jurczak, Quantum computing with neutral atoms, Quantum 4, 327 (2020).
- S. G. Stanchev and N. V. Vitanov, Characterization of high-fidelity Raman qubit gates, Phys. Rev. A 109, 012605 (2024).
- A. Gyenis, P. S. Mundada, A. Di Paolo, T. M. Hazard, X. You, D. I. Schuster, J. Koch, A. Blais, and A. A. Houck, Experimental realization of a protected superconducting circuit derived from the - qubit, PRX Quantum 2, 010339 (2021).
- Y.-H. Lin, L. B. Nguyen, N. Grabon, J. San Miguel, N. Pankratova, and V. E. Manucharyan, Demonstration of protection of a superconducting qubit from energy decay, Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 150503 (2018).
- P. Krantz, M. Kjaergaard, F. Yan, T. P. Orlando, S. Gustavsson, and W. D. Oliver, A quantum engineer’s guide to superconducting qubits, Appl. Phys. Rev. 6, 021318 (2019).
- G. Zhu, D. G. Ferguson, V. E. Manucharyan, and J. Koch, Circuit QED with fluxonium qubits: Theory of the dispersive regime, Phys. Rev. B 87, 024510 (2013).
- A. Blais, A. L. Grimsmo, S. M. Girvin, and A. Wallraff, Circuit quantum electrodynamics, Rev. Mod. Phys. 93, 025005 (2021).
- R. Shillito, A. Petrescu, J. Cohen, J. Beall, M. Hauru, M. Ganahl, A. G. Lewis, G. Vidal, and A. Blais, Dynamics of transmon ionization, Phys. Rev. Appl. 18, 034031 (2022).
- C. M. Caves, J. Combes, Z. Jiang, and S. Pandey, Quantum limits on phase-preserving linear amplifiers, Phys. Rev. A 86, 063802 (2012).
- T. Walter, P. Kurpiers, S. Gasparinetti, P. Magnard, A. Potočnik, Y. Salathé, M. Pechal, M. Mondal, M. Oppliger, C. Eichler, and A. Wallraff, Rapid high-fidelity single-shot dispersive readout of superconducting qubits, Phys. Rev. Appl. 7, 054020 (2017).
- J. Gambetta, A. Blais, M. Boissonneault, A. A. Houck, D. I. Schuster, and S. M. Girvin, Quantum trajectory approach to circuit QED: Quantum jumps and the Zeno effect, Phys. Rev. A 77, 012112 (2008).
- N. Didier, J. Bourassa, and A. Blais, Fast quantum nondemolition readout by parametric modulation of longitudinal qubit-oscillator interaction, Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 203601 (2015).
- K. N. Nesterov, I. V. Pechenezhskiy, and M. G. Vavilov, Counting statistics of microwave photons in circuit QED, Phys. Rev. A 101, 052321 (2020).
- Y. Chen, K. N. Nesterov, H. Churchill, J. Shabani, V. E. Manucharyan, and M. G. Vavilov, Voltage-activated parametric entangling gates based on gatemon qubits, Phys. Rev. Appl. 20, 044012 (2023).
- M. Hays, J. Kim, and W. D. Oliver, Nondegenerate noise-resilient superconducting qubit, PRX Quantum 6, 040321 (2025).
- P. Brooks, A. Kitaev, and J. Preskill, Protected gates for superconducting qubits, Phys. Rev. A 87, 052306 (2013).
- C. Rigetti and M. Devoret, Fully microwave-tunable universal gates in superconducting qubits with linear couplings and fixed transition frequencies, Phys. Rev. B 81, 134507 (2010).
- E. Hyyppä, A. Vepsäläinen, M. Papič, C. F. Chan, S. Inel, A. Landra, W. Liu, J. Luus, F. Marxer, C. Ockeloen-Korppi, S. Orbell, B. Tarasinski, and J. Heinsoo, Reducing leakage of single-qubit gates for superconducting quantum processors using analytical control pulse envelopes, PRX Quantum 5, 030353 (2024).
- F. Motzoi, J. M. Gambetta, P. Rebentrost, and F. K. Wilhelm, Simple pulses for elimination of leakage in weakly nonlinear qubits, Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 110501 (2009).
- T. V. Stefanski and C. K. Andersen, Flux-pulse-assisted readout of a fluxonium qubit, Phys. Rev. Appl. 22, 014079 (2024).
- T. Wang, F. Wu, F. Wang, X. Ma, G. Zhang, J. Chen, H. Deng, R. Gao, R. Hu, L. Ma, Z. Song, T. Xia, M. Ying, H. Zhan, H.-H. Zhao, and C. Deng, Efficient initialization of fluxonium qubits based on auxiliary energy levels, Phys. Rev. Lett. 132, 230601 (2024).
- H. Xiong, Q. Ficheux, A. Somoroff, L. B. Nguyen, E. Dogan, D. Rosenstock, C. Wang, K. N. Nesterov, M. G. Vavilov, and V. E. Manucharyan, Arbitrary controlled-phase gate on fluxonium qubits using differential ac stark shifts, Phys. Rev. Res. 4, 023040 (2022).
- H. Zhang, C. Ding, D. K. Weiss, Z. Huang, Y. Ma, C. Guinn, S. Sussman, S. P. Chitta, D. Chen, A. A. Houck, J. Koch, and D. I. Schuster, Tunable inductive coupler for high-fidelity gates between fluxonium qubits, PRX Quantum 5, 020326 (2024).
- N. D. Dimitrov, C. Wang, V. E. Manucharyan, and M. G. Vavilov, Cross-resonant gates in hybrid fluxonium-transmon systems, arXiv:2509.07935.
- F. Setiawan, P. Groszkowski, and A. A. Clerk, Fast and robust geometric two-qubit gates for superconducting qubits and beyond, Phys. Rev. Appl. 19, 034071 (2023).
- S. Vittal, P. Das, and M. Qureshi, in Proceedings of the 56th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, MICRO ’23 (Association for Computing Machinery, New York, 2023), pp. 509–525.
- J. Johansson, P. Nation, and F. Nori, QuTiP: An open-source Python framework for the dynamics of open quantum systems, Comput. Phys. Commun. 183, 1760 (2012).
- H. Sun, F. Wu, H.-S. Ku, X. Ma, J. Qin, Z. Song, T. Wang, G. Zhang, J. Zhou, Y. Shi, H.-H. Zhao, and C. Deng, Characterization of loss mechanisms in a fluxonium qubit, Phys. Rev. Appl. 20, 034016 (2023).
- W. C. Smith, Design of Protected Superconducting Qubits, Ph.D. thesis, Yale University (2019), copyright—Database copyright ProQuest LLC; ProQuest does not claim copyright in the individual underlying works; Last updated 2023-11-07, https://ezproxy.library.wisc.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/design-protected-superconducting-qubits/docview/2394342301/se-2.
- L. B. Nguyen, Y.-H. Lin, A. Somoroff, R. Mencia, N. Grabon, and V. E. Manucharyan, High-coherence fluxonium qubit, Phys. Rev. X 9, 041041 (2019).
- F. Yan, S. Gustavsson, A. Kamal, J. Birenbaum, A. P. Sears, D. Hover, T. J. Gudmundsen, D. Rosenberg, G. Samach, S. Weber, et al., The flux qubit revisited to enhance coherence and reproducibility, Nat. Commun. 7, 12964 (2016).
- G. Ithier, E. Collin, P. Joyez, P. Meeson, D. Vion, D. Esteve, F. Chiarello, A. Shnirman, Y. Makhlin, J. Schriefl, et al., Decoherence in a superconducting quantum bit circuit, Phys. Rev. B: Condens. Matter Mater. Phys. 72, 134519 (2005).
- P. Groszkowski, A. D. Paolo, A. Grimsmo, A. Blais, D. Schuster, A. A. Houck, and J. Koch, Coherence properties of the 0- qubit, New J. Phys. 20, 043053 (2018).
- M. Mohseni, A. Scherer, K. G. Johnson, O. Wertheim, M. Otten, N. A. Aadit, K. M. Bresniker, K. Y. Camsari, B. Chapman, S. Chatterjee, et al., How to build a quantum supercomputer: Scaling challenges and opportunities, arXiv:2411.10406.
- M. D. Bowdrey, D. K. Oi, A. J. Short, K. Banaszek, and J. A. Jones, Fidelity of single qubit maps, Phys. Lett. A 294, 258 (2002).
- J. Dalibard, Y. Castin, and K. Mølmer, Wave-function approach to dissipative processes in quantum optics, Phys. Rev. Lett. 68, 580 (1992).
- Photon number is associated with the coherent state by .
- M. F. Dumas, B. Groleau-Paré, A. McDonald, M. H. Muñoz Arias, C. Lledó, B. D’Anjou, and A. Blais, Measurement-induced transmon ionization, Phys. Rev. X 14, 041023 (2024).
- P. Guilmin, R. Gautier, A. Bocquet, and É. Genois, Dynamiqs: an open-source python library for gpu-accelerated and differentiable simulation of quantum systems, 2024, https://github.com/dynamiqs/dynamiqs
- I. Zuk, D. Cohen, A. V. Gorshkov, and A. Retzker, Robust gates with spin-locked superconducting qubits, Phys. Rev. Res. 6, 013217 (2024).
- A. A. Clerk and D. W. Utami, Using a qubit to measure photon-number statistics of a driven thermal oscillator, Phys. Rev. A 75, 042302 (2007).
- M. Saffman, I. I. Beterov, A. Dalal, E. J. Páez, and B. C. Sanders, Symmetric Rydberg controlled- gates with adiabatic pulses, Phys. Rev. A 101, 062309 (2020).
- H. Ribeiro and A. A. Clerk, Accelerated adiabatic quantum gates: Optimizing speed versus robustness, Phys. Rev. A 100, 032323 (2019).
