Hybrid quantum device with a carbon nanotube and a flux qubit for dissipative quantum engineering

We describe a hybrid quantum system composed of a micrometer-size carbon nanotube (CNT) longitudinally coupled to a flux qubit. We demonstrate the usefulness of this device for generating high-fidelity nonclassical states of the CNT via dissipative quantum engineering. Sideband cooling of the CNT to its ground state and generating a squeezed ground state, as a mechanical analogue of the optical squeezed vacuum, are two additional examples of the dissipative quantum engineering studied here. Moreover, we show how to generate a long-lived macroscopically-distinct superposition (i.e., a Schr\“odinger cat-like) state. This cat state can be trapped via dark-state methods assuming that the CNT dissipation is negligible compared to the qubit dissipation, and can be verified by detecting the optical response of control fields.