Understanding the nature of two-level tunneling defects is important for minimizing their disruptive effects in various nanodevices. By exploiting the resonant coupling of these defects to a superconducting qubit, one can probe and coherently manipulate them individually. In this work, we utilize a phase qubit to induce Rabi oscillations of single tunneling defects and measure their dephasing rates as a function of the defect's asymmetry energy, which is tuned by an applied strain. The dephasing rates scale quadratically with the external strain and are inversely proportional to the Rabi frequency. These results are analyzed and explained within a model of interacting defects, in which pure dephasing of coherent high-frequency (gigahertz) defects is caused by interaction with incoherent low-frequency thermally excited defects. Our analysis sets an upper bound for the relaxation rates of thermally excited defects interacting strongly with strain fields.

• Received 1 April 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.95.241409