Microwave photon-number amplification

  1. Romain Albert,
  2. Joël Griesmar,
  3. Florian Blanchet,
  4. Ulrich Martel,
  5. Nicolas Bourlet,
  6. and Max Hofheinz
So far, quantum-limited power meters are not available in the microwave domain, hindering measurement of photon number in itinerant quantum states. On the one hand, single photon detectors
accurately detect single photons, but saturate as soon as two photons arrive simultaneously. On the other hand, more linear watt meters, such as bolometers, are too noisy to accurately detect single microwave photons. Linear amplifiers probe non-commuting observables of a signal so that they must add noise and cannot be used to detect single photons, either. Here we experimentally demonstrate a microwave photon-multiplication scheme which combines the advantages of a single photon detector and a power meter by multiplying the incoming photon number by an integer factor. Our first experimental implementation achieves a n = 3-fold multiplication with 0.69 efficiency in a 116 MHz bandwidth up to a input photon rate of 400 MHz. It loses phase information but does not require any dead time or time binning. We expect an optimised device cascading such multipliers to achieve number-resolving measurement of itinerant photons with low dark count, which would offer new possibilities in a wide range of quantum sensing and quantum computing applications.

Multiplying microwave photons by inelastic Cooper-pair tunneling

  1. Juha Leppäkangas,
  2. Michael Marthaler,
  3. Dibyendu Hazra,
  4. Salha Jebari,
  5. Göran Johansson,
  6. and Max Hofheinz
The interaction between propagating microwave fields and Cooper-pair tunneling across a DC voltage-biased Josephson junction can be highly nonlinear. We show theoretically that this
nonlinearity can be used to convert an incoming single microwave photon into an outgoing n-photon Fock state in a different mode. In this process the Coulomb energy released by Cooper-pair tunneling is transferred to the outgoing Fock state, providing energy gain. The conversion can be made reflectionless (impedance-matched) so that all incoming photons are converted to n-photon states. With realistic parameters multiplication ratios n>2 can be reached. By cascading two to three such multiplication stages, the outgoing Fock-states can be sufficiently large to accurately discriminate them from vacuum with linear post-amplification and classical power measurement, implying that our scheme can be used as single-photon detector for itinerant microwave photons without dead time.