Probing a transmon qubit via the ultra-strong coupling to a Josephson waveguide

  1. Javier Puertas Martinez,
  2. Sebastien Leger,
  3. Nicolas Gheereart,
  4. Remy Dassonneville,
  5. Luca Planat,
  6. Farshad Foroughi,
  7. Yuriy Krupko,
  8. Olivier Buisson,
  9. Cecile Naud,
  10. Wiebke Guichard,
  11. Serge Florens,
  12. Izak Snyman,
  13. and Nicolas Roch
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.
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