Scalable quantum technologies may be applied in prospective architectures employing traditional information processing elements, such as transistors, rectifiers, or switches modulatedby low-power inputs. In this respect, recently developed quantum processors based, e.g., on superconducting circuits may alternatively be employed as the basic platform for ultra-low-power consumption classical processors, in addition to obvious applications in quantum information processing and quantum computing. Here we propose a single-photon microwave switch based on a circuit quantum electrodynamics setup, in which a single control photon in a transmission line is able to switch on/off the propagation of another single photon in a separate line. The performances of this single-photon switch are quantified in terms of the photon flux through the output channel, providing a direct comparison of our results with available data. Furthermore, we show how the design of this microwave switch enables the recovery of the single control photon after the switching process. This proposal may be readily realized in state-of-art superconducting circuit technology.
Resolving quantum many-body problems represents one of the greatest challenges in physics and physical chemistry, due to the prohibitively large computational resources that would berequired by using classical computers. A solution has been foreseen by directly simulating the time evolution through sequences of quantum gates applied to arrays of qubits, i.e. by implementing a digital quantum simulator. Superconducting circuits and resonators are emerging as an extremely-promising platform for quantum computation architectures, but a digital quantum simulator proposal that is straightforwardly scalable, universal, and realizable with state-of-the-art technology is presently lacking. Here we propose a viable scheme to implement a universal quantum simulator with hybrid spin-photon qubits in an array of superconducting resonators, which is intrinsically scalable and allows for local control. As representative examples we consider the transverse-field Ising model, a spin-1 Hamiltonian, and the two-dimensional Hubbard model; for these, we numerically simulate the scheme by including the main sources of decoherence. In addition, we show how to circumvent the potentially harmful effects of inhomogeneous broadening of the spin systems.
Coplanar microwave resonators made of 330 nm-thick superconducting YBCO have been realized and characterized in a wide temperature (T, 2-100 K) and magnetic field (B, 0-7 T) range.The quality factor Q significantly exceeds 104 below 55 K and slightly decreases for increasing fields, remaining 90% of Q(B=0) for B=7 T and T=2 K. These features allow to coherently couple resonant photons with spin ensembles at finite temperature and magnetic field. To demonstrate this, collective strong coupling regime was achieved by using the spin ensemble of a DPPH organic radical placed at the magnetic antinode of the fundamental mode: the in-plane magnetic field is used to tune the spin frequency gap across the single-mode cavity resonance at 7.78 GHz, where clear anticrossings are observed with a splitting as large as ∼82 MHz at T=2 K. The spin-cavity collective coupling rate is shown to scale as the square root of the number of active spins in the ensemble.