Decay-protected superconducting qubit with fast control enabled by integrated on-chip filters

Subharmonic control of superconducting qubits simultaneously facilitates fast single-qubit gates, long coherence times, and reduced thermal load. However, its implementation requires a very strong coupling of the drive line to the qubit or an excessively strong microwave signal. To address this challenge, we introduce on-chip filters of the qubit drive that exhibit a stopband at the resonance frequency and ultra-strong coupling at the subharmonic frequency. The on-chip filters are designed to demonstrate qubit T_1 in the millisecond range while enabling fast gates of tens of nanoseconds with subharmonic control. For a resonant drive, we experimentally show a maximum of 200-fold improvement in the measured T_1 and a factor of 220 suppression in the measured Rabi frequency at the stopband. Furthermore, we successfully implemented subharmonic driving of Rabi oscillations with a π-pulse duration of 12 ns. Our demonstration of on-chip filters and the resulting introduction of efficient subharmonic driving in a two-dimensional quantum processor paves the way for a scalable qubit architecture with reduced thermal load and noise from the control line.