Dephasing due to background charge fluctuations

In quantum computation, quantum coherence must be maintained during gate operation. However, in physical implementations, various couplings with the environment are unavoidable and can lead to a dephasing of a quantum bit (qubit). The background charge fluctuations are an important dephasing process, especially in a charge qubit system. We examined the dephasing rate of a qubit due to random telegraph noise. Solving stochastic differential equations, we obtained the dephasing rate of a qubit constructed of a coupled-dot system; we applied our results to the charge Josephson qubit system. We examined the dephasing rates due to two types of couplings between the coupled-dot system and the background charge, namely, fluctuation in the tunnel coupling constant and fluctuation in the asymmetric bias. For a strong-coupling condition, the dephasing rate was inversely proportional to the time constant of the telegraph noise. When there is fluctuation in the tunnel coupling constant, Gaussian decay occurs in the initial regime. We also examined the rate of dephasing due to many impurity sites. For a weak-coupling condition with fluctuation in the asymmetric bias, the obtained dephasing rate coincided with that obtained by the perturbation method using the spectral weight of a boson thermal bath, which is proportional to the inverse of the frequency.