Scalable fluxonium qubit architecture with tunable interactions between non-computational levels (2504.09888v2)

Abstract: The fluxonium qubit has emerged as a promising candidate for superconducting quantum computing due to its long coherence times and high-fidelity gates. Nonetheless, further scaling up and improving performance remain critical challenges for establishing fluxoniums as a viable alternative to transmons. A key obstacle lies in developing scalable coupling architectures. In this work, we introduce a scalable fluxonium architecture that enables decoupling of qubit states while maintaining tunable couplings between non-computational states. Beyond the well-studied ZZ crosstalk, we identify that always-on interactions involving non-computational levels can significantly degrade the fidelities of initialization, control, and readout in large systems, thereby impeding scalability. Based on two possible physical realizations of the architecture, we demonstrate that the issue can be mitigated by implementing tunable couplings for fluxonium plasmon transitions, meanwhile enabling fast, high-fidelity gates with passive ZZ suppression. This comparative analysis enables us to establish general principles for realizing the architecture while understanding and addressing implementation-specific challenges.