Searching topological states of matter in tunable artificial systems has recently become a rapidly growing field of research. Meanwhile, significant experimental progresses on observingtopological phenomena have been made in superconducting circuits. However, topological insulator states have not yet been reported in this system. Here, for the first time, we experimentally realize a spin version of the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model and observe the topological magnon insulator states in a superconducting qubit chain, which manifest both topological invariants and topological edge states. Based on simply monitoring the time evolution of a singlequbit excitation in the chain, we demonstrate that the topological winding numbers and the topological magnon edge and soliton states can all be directly observed. Our work thus opens a new avenue to use controllable qubit chain system to explore novel topological states of matter and also offers exciting possibilities for topologically protected quantum information processing.
Robust quantum state transfer (QST) is an indispensable ingredient in scalable quantum information processing. Here we present an experimentally feasible scheme for robust QST via topologicallyprotected edge states in superconducting circuits. Using superconducting X-mon qubits with tunable couplings, the generalized Su-Schrieffer-Heeger models with topological magnon bands can be constructed. A novel entanglement-dependent topological Thouless pumping can be directly observed in this system. More importantly, we show that single-qubit states and entanglement can be robustly transferred with high fidelity in the presence of qubit-coupling imperfection, which is a hallmark of topological protection. This approach is experimentally applicable to a variety of quantum systems.
We present a feasible protocol to mimic topological Weyl semimetal phase in a small one-dimensional circuit-QED lattice. By modulating the photon hopping rates and on-site photon frequenciesin parametric spaces, we demonstrate that the momentum space of this one-dimensional lattice model can be artificially mapped to three dimensions accompanied by the emergence of topological Weyl semimetal phase. Furthermore, via a lattice-based cavity input-output process, we show that all the essential topological features of Weyl semimetal phase, including the topological charge associated with each Weyl point and the open Fermi arcs, can be unambiguously detected in a circuit with four dissipative resonators by measuring the reflection spectra. These remarkable features may open a new prospect in using well-controlled small quantum lattices to mimic and study topological phases.
We propose a scheme to realize controllable quantum state transfer and entanglement generation among transmon qubits in the typical circuit QED setup based on adiabatic passage. Throughdesigning the time-dependent driven pulses applied on the transmon qubits, we find that fast quantum sate transfer can be achieved between arbitrary two qubits and quantum entanglement among the qubits also can also be engineered. Furthermore, we numerically analyzed the influence of the decoherence on our scheme with the current experimental accessible systematical parameters. The result shows that our scheme is very robust against both the cavity decay and qubit relaxation, the fidelities of the state transfer and entanglement preparation process could be very high. In addition, our scheme is also shown to be insensitive to the inhomogeneous of qubit-resonator coupling strengths.
We introduce a simple method to realize and detect photonic topological Chern insulators with one-dimensional circiut quantum electrodynamics arrays. By periodically modulating thecouplings of the array, we show that this one-dimensional model can be mapped into a two-dimensional Chern insulator model. In addition to allow the study of photonic Chern insulators, this approach also provides a natural platform to realise experimentally Laughlin’s pumping argument. Based on scattering theory of topological insulators and input-output formalism, we show that the photonic edge state can be probed directly and the topological invariant can be detected from the winding number of the reflection coefficient phase.
We propose an analog quantum simulator for the Holstein molecular-crystal model based on a dispersive superconducting circuit QED system composed of transmon qubits and microwave resonators.By varying the circuit parameters, one can readily access both the adiabatic and the anti-adiabatic regimes of this model, and realize the coupling strengths required for small-polaron formation. We present a pumping scheme for preparing small-polaron states of arbitrary quasimomentum within time scales much shorter than the qubit decoherence time. The ground state of the system is characterized by anomalous amplitude fluctuation and measurement-based momentum squeezing in the resonator modes.