The “quantronium” is a superconducting qubit consisting of a split Cooper pair box in which a large tunnel junction is inserted. This circuit has a special bias point where the Larmor frequency is, to first order, insensitive to fluctuations in the bias parameters—the charge of the box island and the phase of the large junction. At this optimal working point, the state of the qubit can be determined by dispersive measurements that probe the second derivative of the state energy with respect to these bias parameters. We use the quantronium phase degree of freedom to perform a nonlinear, dispersive measurement of its inductive response using bifurcation amplification. This dispersive readout projects the state of the qubit in a few nanoseconds, and its latching property allows us to record the resulting information in a few hundred nanoseconds. We have measured, using this technique, Rabi oscillations and Ramsey fringes with an improved signal-to-noise ratio and contrast. The speed of this readout scheme also opens the door for a class of experiments that would characterize the relaxation processes associated with the measurement protocol.

• Received 7 September 2005

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.73.054510