Recent research shows that quasiparticle-induced decoherence of superconducting qubits depends on the superconducting-gap asymmetry originating from the different thicknesses of the top and bottom films in Al/AlOx/Al junctions. Magnetic field is a key tuning knob to investigate this dependence as it can change the superconducting gaps in situ. We present measurements of the parity-switching time of a field-resilient 3D transmon with in-plane field up to 0.41T. At low fields, small parity splitting requires qutrit pulse sequences for parity measurements. We measure a non-monotonic evolution of the parity lifetime with in-plane magnetic field, increasing up to 0.2T, followed by a decrease at higher fields. We demonstrate that the superconducting-gap asymmetry plays a crucial role in the observed behavior. At zero field, the qubit frequency is nearly resonant with the superconducting-gap difference, favoring the energy exchange with the quasiparticles and so enhancing the parity-switching rate. With a higher magnetic field, the qubit frequency decreases and gets detuned from the gap difference, causing the initial increase of the parity lifetime, while photon-assisted qubit transitions increase, producing the subsequent decrease at higher fields. Besides giving a deeper insight into the parity-switching mechanism in conventional transmon qubits, we establish that Al-AlOx-Al JJs could be used in architectures for the parity-readout and manipulation of topological qubits based on Majorana zero modes.
@article{arxiv.2403.03351,
title = {Quasiparticle effects in magnetic-field-resilient 3D transmons},
author = {J. Krause and G. Marchegiani and L. M. Janssen and G. Catelani and Yoichi Ando and C. Dickel},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.03351},
year = {2024}
}