Experimental demonstration of flux-pulse-assisted readout on fluxonium qubits*

In the pursuit of large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computation, various superconducting architectures have been investigated as the potential building blocks for these systems. With the need for fast operations with low error rates, fluxonium qubits have recently gained an increasing amount of attention. The fluxonium qubit offers numerous advantages including a large anharmonicity, long coherence times, protection against flux noise, and resilience against dielectric loss. In an effort to maximize the potential of these devices, we employ flux-pulse-assisted readout to increase the signal to noise ratio and, thus, minimize the readout time required. This readout scheme capitalizes on the high dispersive shift afforded by avoided crossings between the readout resonator and higher order fluxonium transitions. We present experimental results in which we display an advantage of flux-pulse-assisted readout over static readout at the so-called "sweet-spot" on multiple fluxonium qubits.