Decoherence of coupled Josephson charge qubits due to partially correlated low-frequency noise

Josephson charge qubits are promising candidates for scalable quantum computing. However, their performances are strongly degraded by decoherence due to low-frequency background noise, typically with a 1/f spectrum. In this paper, we investigate the decoherence process of two Cooper pair boxes (CPBs) coupled via a capacitor. Going beyond the common and uncorrelated noise models and the Bloch-Redfield formalism of previous works, we study the coupled system's quadratic dephasing under the condition of partially correlated noise sources. Based on reported experiments and generally accepted noise mechanisms, we introduce a reasonable assumption for the noise correlation, with which the calculation of multiqubit decoherence can be simplified to a problem on the single-qubit level. For the conventional Gaussian 1/f noise case, our results demonstrate that the quadratic dephasing rates are not very sensitive to the spatial correlation of the noises. Furthermore, we discuss the feasibility and efficiency of dynamical decoupling in the coupled CPBs