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
17
Dez
2015
Optimal qubit control using single flux quantum pulses
Single flux quantum (SFQ) pulses are a natural candidate for on-chip control of superconducting qubits. We perform single qubit gates at a constant gate time using trains of single
flux quantum pulses with fixed amplitudes. The pulse sequence is optimized by applying genetic algorithms, which decreases the gate error by two orders of magnitude compared to an evenly spaced pulse train. Hereby, we consider leakage transitions into a third energy level as well. Timing jitter of the pulses is taken into account, exploring the robustness of our optimized sequence. This takes us one step further to on-chip qubit controls.
14
Dez
2015
Dynamical polaron ansatz: a theoretical tool for the ultra-strong coupling regime of circuit QED
In this work we develop a semi-analytical variational ansatz to study the properties of few photon excitations interacting with a collection of quantum emitters in regimes that go beyond
the rotating wave approximation. This method can be used to approximate both the static and dynamical properties of a superconducting qubit in an open transmission line, including the spontaneous emission spectrum and the resonances in scattering experiments. The approximations are quantitatively accurate for rather strong couplings, as shown by a direct comparison to Matrix-Product-State numerical methods, and provide also a good qualitative description for stronger couplings well beyond the Markovian regime.
13
Dez
2015
Quantum Zeno effect in the strong measurement regime of circuit quantum electrodynamics
We observe the quantum Zeno effect — where the act of measurement slows the rate of quantum state transitions — in a superconducting qubit using linear circuit quantum electrodynamics
readout and a near-quantum-limited following amplifier. Under simultaneous strong measurement and qubit drive, the qubit undergoes a series of quantum jumps between states. These jumps are visible in the experimental measurement record and are analyzed using maximum likelihood estimation to determine qubit transition rates. The observed rates agree with both analytical predictions and numerical simulations. The analysis methods are suitable for processing general noisy random telegraph signals
07
Dez
2015
What is the Computational Value of Finite Range Tunneling?
Quantum annealing (QA) has been proposed as a quantum enhanced optimization heuristic exploiting tunneling. Here, we demonstrate how finite range tunneling can provide considerable
computational advantage. For a crafted problem designed to have tall and narrow energy barriers separating local minima, the D-Wave 2X quantum annealer achieves significant runtime advantages relative to Simulated Annealing (SA). For instances with 945 variables this results in a time-to-99\%-success-probability that is ∼108 times faster than SA running on a single processor core. We also compared physical QA with Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC), an algorithm that emulates quantum tunneling on classical processors. We observe a substantial constant overhead against physical QA: D-Wave 2X runs up to ∼108 times faster than an optimized implementation of QMC on a single core. To investigate whether finite range tunneling will also confer an advantage for problems of practical interest, we conduct numerical studies on binary optimization problems that cannot yet be represented on quantum hardware. For random instances of the number partitioning problem, we find numerically that QMC, as well as other algorithms designed to simulate QA, scale better than SA and better than the best known classical algorithms for this problem. We discuss the implications of these findings for the design of next generation quantum annealers.
02
Dez
2015
Measurement-Induced Long-Distance Entanglement of Superconducting Qubits using Optomechanical Transducers
While superconducting systems provide a promising platform for quantum computing, their networking poses a considerable challenge as they cannot be interfaced directly to light–the
natural carrier for transmission of quantum signals through channels at room temperature. Here, we show that remote superconducting qubits can be prepared in entangled states by coupling them to mechanical oscillators whose positions are monitored with optical fields. Continuous homodyne detection of light provides information on the total spin of the two qubits such that entangled qubit states can be post-selected. Entanglement generation is possible without ground state cooling of the mechanical oscillators for systems with an optomechanical cooperativity moderately larger than unity; in addition, our setup tolerates a substantial loss of photons in transmission. The approach is scalable to generation of multipartite entanglement and represents a crucial step towards quantum networks with nodes using superconducting circuits.
01
Dez
2015
Entangled microwaves as a resource for entangling spatially separate solid-state qubits: superconducting qubits, NV centers and magnetic molecules
Quantum correlations present in a broadband two-line squeezed microwave state can induce entanglement in a spatially separated bipartite system consisting of either two single qubits
or two qubit ensembles. By using an appropriate master equation for a bipartite quantum system in contact with two separate but entangled baths, the generating entanglement process in spatially separated quantum systems is thoroughly characterized. Our results provide evidence that this entanglement transfer by dissipation is feasible yielding to a steady-state amount of entanglement in the bipartite quantum system which can be optimized for a wide range of realistic physical systems that include state-of-the-art experiments with NV centers in diamond, superconducting qubits or even magnetic molecules embedded in a crystalline matrix.
Engineering Long-Lived Collective Dark States in Spin Ensembles
Ensembles of electron spins in hybrid microwave systems are powerful and versatile components for future quantum technologies. Quantum memories with high storage capacities are one
such example which require long-lived states that can be addressed and manipulated coherently within the inhomogeneously broadened ensemble. This broadening is essential for true multimode memories, but induces a considerable spin dephasing and together with dissipation from a cavity interface poses a constraint on the memory’s storage time. In this work we show how to overcome both of these limitations through the engineering of long-lived dark states in an ensemble of electron spins hosted by nitrogen-vacancy centres in diamond. By burning narrow spectral holes into a spin ensemble strongly coupled to a superconducting microwave cavity, we observe long-lived Rabi oscillations with high visibility and a decay rate that is a factor of forty smaller than the spin ensemble linewidth and thereby a factor of more than three below the pure cavity dissipation rate. This significant reduction lives up to the promise of hybrid devices to perform better than their individual subcomponents. To demonstrate the potential of our approach we realise the first step towards a solid-state microwave spin multiplexer by engineering multiple long-lived dark states. Our results show that we can fully access the „decoherence free“ subspace in our experiment and selectively prepare protected states by spectral hole burning. This technique opens up the way for truly long-lived quantum memories, solid-state microwave frequency combs, optical to microwave quantum transducers and spin squeezed states. Our approach also paves the way for a new class of cavity QED experiments with dense spin ensembles, where dipole spin-spin interactions become important and many-body phenomena will be directly accessible on a chip.
Aharonov-Bohm phases in a quantum LC circuit
We study novel types of contributions to the partition function of the Maxwell system defined on a small compact manifold. These contributions, often not addressed in the perturbative
treatment with physical photons, emerge as a result of tunneling transitions between topologically distinct but physically identical vacuum winding states. These new terms give an extra contribution to the Casimir pressure, yet to be measured. We argue that this effect is highly sensitive to a small external electric field, which should be contrasted with the conventional Casimir effect where the vacuum photons are essentially unaffected by any external field. Furthermore, photons will be emitted from the vacuum in response to a time-dependent electric field, similar to the dynamical Casimir effect in which real particles are radiated from the vacuum due to the time-dependent boundary conditions. We also propose an experimental setup using a quantum LC circuit to detect this novel effect. We expect physical electric charges to appear on the capacitor plates when the system dimension is such that coherent Aharonov-Bohm phases can be maintained over macroscopically large distances.
30
Nov
2015
Quantum chemistry and charge transport in biomolecules with superconducting circuits
We propose an efficient protocol for digital quantum simulation of quantum chemistry problems and enhanced digital-analog quantum simulation of transport phenomena in biomolecules with
superconducting circuits. Along these lines, we prove that fermionic models of molecular structure can be optimally digitalized with single-qubit and two-qubit gates, by means of Trotter-Suzuki decomposition and Jordan-Wigner transformation. Furthermore, we address the modelling of system-environment interactions of biomolecules involving bosonic degrees of freedom with a digital-analog approach. Finally, we consider gate-truncated quantum algorithms to allow the study of environmental effects.
Dynamic transition in Landau-Zener-Stückelberg interferometry of dissipative systems: the case of the flux qubit
We study Landau-Zener-Stuckelberg (LZS) interferometry in multilevel systems coupled to an Ohmic quantum bath. We consider the case of superconducting flux qubits driven by a dc+ac
magnetic fields, but our results can apply to other similar systems. We find a dynamic transition manifested by a symmetry change in the structure of the LZS interference pattern, plotted as a function of ac amplitude and dc detuning. The dynamic transition is from a LZS pattern with nearly symmetric multiphoton resonances to antisymmetric multiphoton resonances at long times (above the relaxation time). We also show that the presence of a resonant mode in the quantum bath can impede the dynamic transition when the resonant frequency is of the order of the qubit gap. Our results are obtained by a numerical calculation of the finite time and the asymptotic stationary population of the qubit states, using the Floquet-Markov approach to solve a realistic model of the flux qubit considering up to 10 energy levels.