Absence of Charge Offset Drift in a Transmon Qubit
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Quantum Physics arXiv:2603.12367 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 12 Mar 2026] Title:Absence of Charge Offset Drift in a Transmon Qubit Authors:Adria Rospars, Hector Hutin, Yannick Seis, Cristóbal Lledó, Réouven Assouly, Romain Cazali, Rémy Dassonneville, Ambroise Peugeot, Alexandre Blais, Audrey Bienfait, Benjamin Huard View a PDF of the paper titled Absence of Charge Offset Drift in a Transmon Qubit, by Adria Rospars and 10 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Superconducting quantum circuits are sensitive to their electrostatic environment: uncontrolled charges accumulating on the electrodes of a Josephson junction shift the energy levels of a qubit, perturbing its operation and restricting their design. This effect is captured by a single parameter - the charge offset - whose slow, unpredictable drift has proven difficult to eliminate in practice. Here, we report a tantalum-based transmon qubit in which the charge offset remains pinned at zero over nearly three months of measurements, including two thermal cycles, with no observable compromise to the qubit lifetime. This exceptional stability disappears in later cooldowns, indicating a fragile mechanism at play. We attribute it to the inductance of a thin superconducting layer inadvertently formed in parallel with the Josephson junction during fabrication. X-ray surface spectroscopy suggests this layer arises from an incomplete wet-etch of tantalum on sapphire. Deliberately engineering such a layer offers a route to eliminating charge-offset drift in superconducting circuits more broadly. Comments: Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall); Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci) Cite as: arXiv:2603.12367 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2603.12367v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.12367 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Benjamin Huard [view email] [v1] Thu, 12 Mar 2026 18:36:53 UTC (5,240 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Absence of Charge Offset Drift in a Transmon Qubit, by Adria Rospars and 10 other authorsView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cond-mat cond-mat.mes-hall cond-mat.mtrl-sci References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) Links to Code Toggle Papers with Code (What is Papers with Code?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)