Coupling spin ‚clock states‘ to superconducting circuits

  1. Ignacio Gimeno,
  2. David Zueco,
  3. Yan Duan,
  4. Carlos Sánchez-Azqueta,
  5. Thomas Astner,
  6. Alejandro Gaita-Ariño,
  7. Stephen Hill,
  8. Johannes Majer,
  9. Eugenio Coronado,
  10. and Fernando Luis
A central goal in quantum technologies is to maximize GT2, where G stands for the rate at which each qubit can be coherently driven and T2 is the qubit’s phase coherence time.
This is challenging, as increasing G (e.g. by coupling the qubit more strongly to external stimuli) often leads to deleterious effects on T2. Here, we study a physical situation in which both G and T2 can be simultaneously optimized. We measure the coupling to microwave superconducting coplanar waveguides of pure (i.e. non magnetically diluted) crystals of HoW10 magnetic clusters, which show level anticrossings, or spin clock transitions, at equidistant magnetic fields. The absorption lines give a complete picture of the magnetic energy level scheme and, in particular, confirm the existence of such clock transitions. The quantitative analysis of the microwave transmission allows monitoring the overlap between spin wave functions and gives information about their coupling to the environment and to the propagating photons. The formation of quantum superpositions of spin-up and spin-down states at the clock transitions allows simultaneously maximizing the spin-photon coupling and minimizing environmental spin perturbations. Using the same experimental device, we also explore the coupling of these qubits to a 11.7 GHz cavity mode, arising from a nonperfect microwave propagation at the chip boundaries and find a collective spin to single photon coupling GN = 100 MHz. The engineering of spin states in molecular systems offers a promising strategy to combine sizeable photon-mediated interactions, thus scalability, with a sufficient isolation from unwanted magnetic noise sources.

Dynamical Exploration of Amplitude Bistability in Engineered Quantum Systems

  1. Andreas Angerer,
  2. Stefan Putz,
  3. Dmitry O. Krimer,
  4. Thomas Astner,
  5. Matthias Zens,
  6. Ralph Glattauer,
  7. Kirill Streltsov,
  8. William J. Munro,
  9. Kae Nemoto,
  10. Stefan Rotter,
  11. Jörg Schmiedmayer,
  12. and Johannes Majer
Nonlinear systems, whose outputs are not directly proportional to their inputs, are well known to exhibit many interesting and important phenomena which have profoundly changed our
technological landscape over the last 50 years. Recently the ability to engineer quantum metamaterials through hybridisation has allowed to explore these nonlinear effects in systems with no natural analogue. Here we investigate amplitude bistability, which is one of the most fundamental nonlinear phenomena, in a hybrid system composed of a superconducting resonator inductively coupled to an ensemble of nitrogen-vacancy centres. One of the exciting properties of this spin system is its extremely long spin life-time, more than ten orders of magnitude longer than other relevant timescales of the hybrid system. This allows us to dynamically explore this nonlinear regime of cavity quantum electrodynamics (cQED) and demonstrate a critical slowing down of the cavity population on the order of several tens of thousands of seconds – a timescale much longer than observed so far for this effect. Our results provide the foundation for future quantum technologies based on nonlinear phenomena.