A Schrodinger Cat Living in Two Boxes

  1. Chen Wang,
  2. Yvonne Y. Gao,
  3. Philip Reinhold,
  4. R. W. Heeres,
  5. Nissim Ofek,
  6. Kevin Chou,
  7. Christopher Axline,
  8. Matthew Reagor,
  9. Jacob Blumoff,
  10. K. M. Sliwa,
  11. L. Frunzio,
  12. S. M. Girvin,
  13. Liang Jiang,
  14. M. Mirrahimi,
  15. M. H. Devoret,
  16. and R. J. Schoelkopf
Quantum superpositions of distinct coherent states in a single-mode harmonic oscillator, known as „cat states“, have been an elegant demonstration of Schrodinger’s famous cat paradox. Here, we realize a two-mode cat state of electromagnetic fields in two microwave cavities bridged by a superconducting artificial atom, which can also be viewed as an entangled pair of single-cavity cat states. We present full quantum state tomography of this complex cat state over a Hilbert space exceeding 100 dimensions via quantum non-demolition measurements of the joint photon number parity. The ability to manipulate such multi-cavity quantum states paves the way for logical operations between redundantly encoded qubits for fault-tolerant quantum computation and communication.
arxiv pdf

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