We discuss the current situation concerning measurement and readout of
Josephson-junction based qubits. In particular we focus attention of dispersive
low-dissipation techniques involving reflection of radiation from an oscillator
circuit coupled to a qubit, allowing single-shot determination of the state of
the qubit. In particular we develop a formalism describing a charge qubit read
out by measuring its effective (quantum) capacitance. To exemplify, we also
give explicit formulas for the readout time.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures. To be published in J. Phys.: Condensed Matter,
18 (2006) Special issue: Quantum computin
