Observation of multi-component atomic Schrödinger cat states of up to 20 qubits

  1. Chao Song,
  2. Kai Xu,
  3. Hekang Li,
  4. Yuran Zhang,
  5. Xu Zhang,
  6. Wuxin Liu,
  7. Qiujiang Guo,
  8. Zhen Wang,
  9. Wenhui Ren,
  10. Jie Hao,
  11. Hui Feng,
  12. Heng Fan,
  13. Dongning Zheng,
  14. Dawei Wang,
  15. H. Wang,
  16. and Shiyao Zhu
We report on deterministic generation of 18-qubit genuinely entangled Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state and multi-component atomic Schrödinger cat states of up to 20 qubits on
a quantum processor, which features 20 superconducting qubits interconnected by a bus resonator. By engineering a one-axis twisting Hamiltonian enabled by the resonator-mediated interactions, the system of qubits initialized coherently evolves to an over-squeezed, non-Gaussian regime, where atomic Schrödinger cat states, i.e., superpositions of atomic coherent states including GHZ state, appear at specific time intervals in excellent agreement with theory. With high controllability, we are able to take snapshots of the dynamics by plotting quasidistribution Q-functions of the 20-qubit atomic cat states, and globally characterize the 18-qubit GHZ state which yields a fidelity of 0.525±0.005 confirming genuine eighteen-partite entanglement. Our results demonstrate the largest entanglement controllably created so far in solid state architectures, and the process of generating and detecting multipartite entanglement may promise applications in practical quantum metrology, quantum information processing and quantum computation.