Continuous measurement of a charge qubit with a point contact detector at arbitrary bias: the role of inelastic tunnelling

Abstract

We study the dynamics of a charge qubit, consisting of a single electron in a double well potential, coupled to a point-contact (PC) electrometer using the quantum trajectories formalism. In contrast with previous work, our analysis is valid for arbitrary source-drain bias across the PC, but is restricted to the sub-Zeno limit. We find that the dynamics is strongly affected by inelastic tunnelling processes in the PC. These processes reduce the efficiency of the PC as a qubit readout device, and induce relaxation even when the source-drain bias is zero. We show that the sub-Zeno dynamics are divided into two regimes: low- and high-bias in which the PC current and current power spectra show markedly different behaviour. To further illustrate the division between the regimes and the inefficiency of the detector, we present simulated quantum trajectories of the conditional qubit and detector dynamics. We also describe how single shot measurements in an arbitrary basis may be achieved in the sub-Zeno regime.