  Transmon qubits are ubiquitous in the pursuit of quantum computing using
superconducting circuits. However, they have some drawbacks that still need to
be addressed. Most importantly, the scalability of transmons is limited by the
large device footprint needed to reduce the participation of the lossy
capacitive parts of the circuit. In this work, we investigate and evaluate
losses in an alternative device geometry, namely, the merged-element transmon
(mergemon). To this end, we replace the large external shunt capacitor of a
traditional transmon with the intrinsic capacitance of a Josephson junction
(JJ) and achieve an approximately 100 times reduction in qubit dimensions. We
report the implementation of the mergemon using a sputtered
Nb--amorphous-Si--Nb trilayer film. In an experiment below 10 mK, the frequency
of the readout resonator, capacitively coupled to the mergemon, exhibits a
qubit-state dependent shift in the low power regime. The device also
demonstrates the single- and multi-photon transitions that represent a weakly
anharmonic system in the two-tone spectroscopy. The transition spectra are
explained well with master-equation simulations. A participation ratio analysis
identifies the dielectric loss of the a-Si tunnel barrier and its interfaces as
the dominant source for qubit relaxation. We expect the mergemon to achieve
high coherence in relatively small device dimensions when implemented using a
low-loss, epitaxially-grown, and lattice-matched trilayer.
