Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Martínez, Lionel E., García-Mata, Ignacio, Wisniacki, Diego A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15175
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915891404341248
author Martínez, Lionel E.
García-Mata, Ignacio
Wisniacki, Diego A.
author_facet Martínez, Lionel E.
García-Mata, Ignacio
Wisniacki, Diego A.
contents We show that chaos-assisted tunneling (CAT) imposes an intrinsic limit to the protection of Kerr-cat qubits. In the static effective description, tunneling between the quasidegenerate cat states can be exponentially suppressed, ensuring long lifetimes. However, our Floquet analysis reveals that when the nonlinearities increase, chaotic states mediate tunneling between the cat states, producing large quasienergy splittings. We compute tunneling rates using both full quantum simulations and semiclassical WKB theory, finding quantitative agreement and confirming that the splittings are directly linked to chaos. These results provide the first evidence of CAT in the Kerr-cat qubit and demonstrate that chaos sets a fundamental bound on the coherence of dynamically protected superconducting qubits.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_15175
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fundamental Limits to Cat-Code Qubits from Chaos-Assisted Tunneling
Martínez, Lionel E.
García-Mata, Ignacio
Wisniacki, Diego A.
Quantum Physics
We show that chaos-assisted tunneling (CAT) imposes an intrinsic limit to the protection of Kerr-cat qubits. In the static effective description, tunneling between the quasidegenerate cat states can be exponentially suppressed, ensuring long lifetimes. However, our Floquet analysis reveals that when the nonlinearities increase, chaotic states mediate tunneling between the cat states, producing large quasienergy splittings. We compute tunneling rates using both full quantum simulations and semiclassical WKB theory, finding quantitative agreement and confirming that the splittings are directly linked to chaos. These results provide the first evidence of CAT in the Kerr-cat qubit and demonstrate that chaos sets a fundamental bound on the coherence of dynamically protected superconducting qubits.
title Fundamental Limits to Cat-Code Qubits from Chaos-Assisted Tunneling
topic Quantum Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15175