I am going to post here all newly submitted articles on the arXiv related to superconducting circuits. If your article has been accidentally forgotten, feel free to contact me
02
Feb
2018
Probing a transmon qubit via the ultra-strong coupling to a Josephson waveguide
Exploring the quantum world often starts by drawing a sharp boundary between a microscopic subsystem and the bath to which it is invariably coupled. In most cases, knowledge of the
physical processes occuring in the bath is not required in great detail. However, recent developments in circuit quantum electrodynamics are presenting regimes where the actual dynamics of engineered baths, such as microwave photon resonators, becomes relevant. Here we take a major technological step forward, by tailoring a centimeter-scale on-chip bath from a very long metamaterial made of 4700 tunable Josephson junctions. By monitoring how each measurable bosonic resonance of the circuit acquires a phase-shift due to its interaction with a transmon qubit, one can indirectly measure qubit properties, such as transition frequency, linewidth and non-linearity. This new platform also demonstrates the ultra-strong coupling regime for the first time in the context of Josephson waveguides. Our device combines a large number of modes (up to 10 in the present setup) that are simultaneously hybridised with the two-level system, and a broadening dominated by the artificial environment that is a sizeable fraction of the qubit transition frequency. Finally, we provide a quantitative and parameter-free model of this large quantum system, and show that the finite environment seen by the qubit is equivalent to a truly macroscopic bath.
A tunable Josephson platform to explore many-body quantum optics in circuit-QED
The quest to understand interaction between light and matter stretches back to the ray optics of Euclid and Ptolemy. In recent decades, studies at the quantum scale were performed by
coupling an isolated emitter to a single mode of the electromagnetic field, standard quantum optics providing a complete toolbox for describing such a setup. Current efforts aim to explore the coherent dynamics of systems containing an emitter coupled to several electromagnetic degrees of freedom. Combining superconducting metamaterials and qubits could allow for the observation of genuinely macroscopic quantum effects such as a giant Lamb shift or non-classical states of multimode optical fields. In this work, we couple a transmon qubit to a high impedance, centimeter-scale, metamaterial waveguide, made of 4700 in-situ tunable Josephson junctions. Our device combines three essential properties required to go beyond the standard quantum optics paradigm and reach the multi-mode, many-body regime, namely: a tunable waveguide with a high density of electromagnetic modes, a qubit non-linearity comparable to the other relevant energy scales, and ultrastrong coupling between the qubit and the waveguide modes. Besides providing experimental evidence for these non-trivial requirements, we also develop a quantitative theoretical description that does not contain any phenomenological parameters and that accurately takes into account vacuum fluctuations of our large scale quantum circuit in the regime of ultrastrong coupling and intermediate non-linearity. Furthermore, we show that the influence on the transmon of our fully controllable on-chip environment well approximates that of the macroscopic bath envisioned in the celebrated work of Caldeira and Leggett. Our work demonstrates that Josephson waveguides offer a promising platform to explore many-body quantum optics.
30
Jan
2018
Quantum-limited Parametric Amplification with Josephson Circuits in the Regime of Pump Depletion
Linear parametric amplification is a key operation in information processing. Our interest here is quantum-limited parametric amplification, i.e., amplification of quantum signals while
adding the minimum amount of noise allowed by quantum mechanics, which is essential for any viable implementation of quantum information processing. We describe parametric amplifiers based on the dispersive nonlinearity of Josephson junctions driven with appropriate tones playing the role of pumps. We discuss two defining characteristics in the architecture of these amplifiers: the number of modes occupied by the signal, idler and pump waves and the number of independent ports through which these waves enter into the circuit. We discuss scattering properties of these amplifiers. This is followed by computations of the dynamic range and phase-space distributions of the fluctuations of the modes of the amplifiers.
Interacting Qubit-Photon Bound States with Superconducting Circuits
Qubits strongly coupled to a photonic crystal give rise to many exotic physical scenarios, beginning with single and multi-excitation qubit-photon dressed bound states comprising induced
spatially localized photonic modes, centered around the qubits, and the qubits themselves. The localization of these states changes with qubit detuning from the band-edge, offering an avenue of in situ control of bound state interaction. Here, we present experimental results from a device with two qubits coupled to a superconducting microwave photonic crystal and realize tunable on-site and inter-bound state interactions. We observe a fourth-order two photon virtual process between bound states indicating strong coupling between the photonic crystal and qubits. Due to their localization-dependent interaction, these states offer the ability to create one-dimensional chains of bound states with tunable and potentially long-range interactions that preserve the qubits‘ spatial organization, a key criterion for realization of certain quantum many-body models. The widely tunable, strong and robust interactions demonstrated with this system are promising benchmarks towards realizing larger, more complex systems of bound states.
Noise and loss of superconducting aluminium resonators at single photon energies
The loss and noise mechanisms of superconducting resonators are useful tools for understanding decoherence in superconducting circuits. While the loss mechanisms have been heavily studied,
noise in superconducting resonators has only recently been investigated. In particular, there is an absence of literature on noise in the single photon limit. Here, we measure the loss and noise of an aluminium on silicon quarter-wavelength (λ/4) resonator in the single photon regime.
25
Jan
2018
Simulation of topological nodal-loop bands on a superconducting circuits chain
Nodal-loop semimetal is one of the exotic gapless topological states of matter that are discovered recently. Here we propose an experimentally feasible scheme to simulate the three-dimensional
topological nodal-loop semimetal bands in a one-dimensional circuit quantum electrodynamics lattice, by introducing two additional parameter dimensions. A unit-cell of the lattice consists of a transmissionline resonator coupled by a superconducting transmon qubit, and two of the dressed states in a unit-cell are used to simulate the spin-1/2 states of an electron. The neighboring transmission-line resonators are connected by a superconducting quantum interference device, and the effective hopping among them is induced by parametric coupling. Meanwhile, the two artificial dimensions are simulated by tunable Zeeman terms of the spins. The detection of the mimic nodal-loop bands is also discussed and is shown to be well within current technology. Therefore, our scheme provides a feasible way to explore nodal-loop semimetal bands and other topological bands of different spin-orbit coupling forms in this controllable artificial system.
24
Jan
2018
Rapid high-fidelity multiplexed readout of superconducting qubits
The duration and fidelity of qubit readout is a critical factor for applications in quantum information processing as it limits the fidelity of algorithms which reuse qubits after measurement
or apply feedback based on the measurement result. Here we present fast multiplexed readout of five qubits in a single 1.2 GHz wide readout channel. Using a readout pulse length of 80 ns and populating readout resonators for less than 250 ns we find an average correct assignment probability for the five measured qubits to be 97%. The differences between the individual readout errors and those found when measuring the qubits simultaneously are within 1%. We employ individual Purcell filters for each readout resonator to suppress off-resonant driving, which we characterize by the dephasing imposed on unintentionally measured qubits. We expect the here presented readout scheme to become particularly useful for the selective readout of individual qubits in multi-qubit quantum processors.
23
Jan
2018
Fast and Unconditional All-Microwave Reset of a Superconducting Qubit
Active qubit reset is a key operation in many quantum algorithms, and particularly in error correction codes. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a reset scheme of a three level transmon
artificial atom coupled to a large bandwidth resonator. The reset protocol uses a microwave-induced interaction between the |f,0⟩ and |g,1⟩ states of the coupled transmon-resonator system, with |g⟩ and |f⟩ denoting the ground and second excited states of the transmon, and |0⟩ and |1⟩ the photon Fock states of the resonator. We characterize the reset process and demonstrate reinitialization of the transmon-resonator system to its ground state with 0.2% residual excitation in less than 500ns. Our protocol is of practical interest as it has no requirements on the architecture, beyond those for fast and efficient single-shot readout of the transmon, and does not require feedback.
20
Jan
2018
PT-symmetric circuit-QED
The Hermiticity axiom of quantum mechanics guarantees that the energy spectrum is real and the time evolution is unitary (probability-preserving). Nevertheless, non-Hermitian but -symmetric
Hamiltonians may also have real eigenvalues. Systems described by such effective -symmetric Hamiltonians have been realized in experiments using coupled systems with balanced loss (dissipation) and gain (amplification), and their corresponding classical dynamics has been studied. A -symmetric system emerging from a quantum dynamics is highly desirable, in order to understand what -symmetry and the powerful mathematical and physical concepts around it will bring to the next generation of quantum technologies. Here, we address this need by proposing and studying a circuit-QED architecture that consists of two coupled resonators and two qubits (each coupled to one resonator). By means of external driving fields on the qubits, we are able to tune gain and losses in the resonators. Starting with the quantum dynamics of this system, we show the emergence of the -symmetry via the selection of both driving amplitudes and frequencies. We engineer the system such that a non-number conserving dipole-dipole interaction emerges, introducing an instability at large coupling strengths. The -symmetry and its breaking, as well as the predicted instability in this circuit-QED system can be observed in a transmission experiment.
18
Jan
2018
Multimode cat codes
We introduce a driven-dissipative two-mode bosonic system whose reservoir causes simultaneous loss of two photons in each mode and whose steady states are superpositions of pair-coherent/Barut-Girardello
coherent states. We show how quantum information encoded in a steady-state subspace of this system is exponentially immune to phase drifts (cavity dephasing) in both modes. Additionally, it is possible to protect information from arbitrary photon loss in either (but not simultaneously both) of the modes by continuously monitoring the difference between the expected photon numbers of the logical states. Despite employing more resources, the two-mode scheme enjoys two advantages over its one-mode counterpart with regards to implementation using current circuit QED technology. First, monitoring the photon number difference can be done without turning off the currently implementable dissipative stabilizing process. Second, a lower average photon number per mode is required to enjoy a level of protection at least as good as that of the cat-codes. We discuss circuit QED proposals to stabilize the code states, perform gates, and protect against photon loss via either active syndrome measurement or an autonomous procedure. We introduce quasiprobability distributions allowing us to represent two-mode states of fixed photon number difference in a two-dimensional complex plane, instead of the full four-dimensional two-mode phase space. The two-mode codes are generalized to multiple modes in an extension of the stabilizer formalism to non-diagonalizable stabilizers. The M-mode codes can protect against either arbitrary photon losses in up to M−1 modes or arbitrary losses or gains in any one mode.