Dresden 2020 – scientific programme

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HL: Fachverband Halbleiterphysik

HL 55: Superconducting Electronics: SQUIDs, Qubits, Circuit QED, Quantum Coherence and Quantum Information Systems 2 (jointly with MA, HL) (joint session TT/HL)

HL 55.6: Talk

Thursday, March 19, 2020, 10:45–11:00, HSZ 03

Quasiclassical Green's Function Approach to Normal-Metal Quasiparticle Traps — •Raphael Schmit and Frank Wilhelm — Saarland University, Theoretical Physics Department

Superconducting qubits, such as the charge or the flux qubit, are thought to store the information needed for quantum information processing. However, unwanted interactions with the qubit's environment lead to decoherence of the qubit and thus information loss. In addition to these extrinsic sources for decoherence, there is also an intrinsic one: the coupling between the qubit and the non-equilibrium quasiparticle excitations in the superconductor the qubit is made of. Decoherence is due to quasiparticle tunneling through a Josephson junction, but there is also an inhomogeneous broadening caused by changes in the occupations of Andreev states in the junction. Both mechanisms are highly depending on the location of the quasiparticles: quasiparticles far away from junctions have much less contribution to decoherence than the ones close to it. While it is difficult to prevent the generation of quasiparticles, trapping them in less active regions of the device seems to provide a practicable way to improve the device performance.

We are aiming to establish a quantitative theory of normal-metal traps simply consisting of an island of normal metal which is in good metallic contact with the superconductor. To do so, we are applying a Green's function formalism - the Keldysh technique in the dirty limit with a quasiclassical approximation - to investigate the properties of non-equilibrium quasiparticles in mesoscopic devices.