Photon decay in circuit quantum electrodynamics

  1. Roman Kuzmin,
  2. Nicholas Grabon,
  3. Nitish Mehta,
  4. Amir Burshtein,
  5. Moshe Goldstein,
  6. Manuel Houzet,
  7. Leonid I. Glazman,
  8. and Vladimir E. Manucharyan
Light does not typically scatter light, as witnessed by the linearity of Maxwell’s equations. We constructed a superconducting circuit, in which microwave photons have well-defined energy and momentum, but their lifetime is finite due to decay into lower energy photons. The inelastic photon-photon interaction originates from quantum phase-slip fluctuation in a single Josephson junction and has no analogs in quantum optics. Instead, the surprisingly high decay rate is explained by mapping the system to a Luttinger liquid containing an impurity. Our result connects circuit quantum electrodynamics to the topic of boundary quantum field theories in two dimensions, influential to both high-energy and condensed matter physics. The photon lifetime data is a rare example of a verified and useful quantum many-body simulation.
arxiv pdf

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