Stabilizing a Bosonic Qubit Using Colored Dissipation

Protected qubits such as the 0-pi qubit, and bosonic qubits including cat qubits and Gottesman-KitaevPreskill (GKP) qubits offer advantages for fault tolerance. Some of these protected qubits (e.g., 0-pi qubit and Kerr-cat qubit) are stabilized by Hamiltonians which have (near-)degenerate ground state manifolds with large energy gaps to the excited state manifolds. Without dissipative stabilization mechanisms the performance of such energy-gap-protected qubits can be limited by leakage to excited states. Here, we propose a scheme for dissipatively stabilizing an energy-gap-protected qubit using colored (i.e., frequency selective) dissipation without inducing errors in the ground state manifold. Concretely we apply our colored dissipation technique to Kerr-cat qubits and propose colored Kerr-cat qubits which are protected by an engineered colored single-photon loss. When applied to the Kerr-cat qubits our scheme significantly suppresses leakage-induced bit-flip errors (which we show are a limiting error mechanism) while only using linear interactions. Beyond the benefits to the Kerr-cat qubit we also show that our frequency selective loss technique can be applied to a broader class of protected qubits.

Automated summary

This article introduces a scheme for stabilizing energy-gap-protected qubits using colored dissipation, specifically focusing on Kerr-cat qubits. This technique effectively suppresses leakage-induced bit-flip errors and improves the performance of quantum bits.