Life after charge noise: recent results with transmon qubits

A. A. Houck, Jens Koch, M. H. Devoret, S. M. Girvin, R. J. Schoelkopf

Published 2008-12-10Version 1

We review the main theoretical and experimental results for the transmon, a superconducting charge qubit derived from the Cooper pair box. The increased ratio of the Josephson to charging energy results in an exponential suppression of the transmon's sensitivity to 1/f charge noise. This has been observed experimentally and yields homogeneous broadening, negligible pure dephasing, and long coherence times of up to 3 microseconds. Anharmonicity of the energy spectrum is required for qubit operation, and has been proven to be sufficient in transmon devices. Transmons have been implemented in a wide array of experiments, demonstrating consistent and reproducible results in very good agreement with theory.