Hybrid quantum systems aim at combining the advantages of different physical systems and to produce novel quantum devices. In particular, the hybrid combination of superconducting circuitsand spins in solid-state crystals is a versatile platform to explore many quantum electrodynamics problems. Recently, the remote coupling of nitrogen-vacancy center spins in diamond via a superconducting bus was demonstrated. However, a rigorous experimental test of the quantum nature of this hybrid system and in particular entanglement is still missing. We review the theoretical ideas to generate and detect entanglement, and present our own scheme to achieve this.
Electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy is an important technology in physics, chemistry, materials science, and biology. Sensitive detection with a small sample volume isa key objective in these areas, because it is crucial, for example, for the readout of a highly packed spin based quantum memory or the detection of unlabeled metalloproteins in a single cell. In conventional EPR spectrometers, the energy transfer from the spins to the cavity at a Purcell enhanced rate plays an essential role and requires the spins to be resonant with the cavity, however the size of the cavity (limited by the wavelength) makes it difficult to improve the spatial resolution. Here, we demonstrate a novel EPR spectrometer using a single artificial atom as a sensitive detector of spin magnetization. The artificial atom, a superconducting flux qubit, provides advantages both in terms of its quantum properties and its much stronger coupling with magnetic fields. We have achieved a sensitivity of ∼400 spins/Hz‾‾‾√ with a magnetic sensing volume around 10−14λ3 (50 femto-liters). This corresponds to an improvement of two-order of magnitude in the magnetic sensing volume compared with the best cavity based spectrometers while maintaining a similar sensitivity as those spectrometers . Our artificial atom is suitable for scaling down and thus paves the way for measuring single spins on the nanometer scale.
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 ourtechnological 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.
The hybridization of distinct quantum systems is now seen as an effective way to engineer the properties of an entire system leading to applications in quantum metamaterials, quantumsimulation, and quantum metrology. One well known example is superconducting circuits coupled to ensembles of microscopic natural atoms. In such cases, the properties of the individual atom are intrinsic, and so are unchangeable. However, current technology allows us to fabricate large ensembles of macroscopic artificial atoms such as superconducting flux qubits, where we can really tailor and control the properties of individual qubits. Here, we demonstrate coherent coupling between a microwave resonator and several thousand superconducting flux qubits, where we observe a large dispersive frequency shift in the spectrum of 250 MHz induced by collective behavior. These results represent the largest number of coupled superconducting qubits realized so far. Our approach shows that it is now possible to engineer the properties of the ensemble, opening up the way for the controlled exploration of the quantum many-body system.
The engineering of quantum devices has reached the stage where we now have small scale quantum processors containing multiple interacting qubits within them. Simple quantum circuitshave been demonstrated and scaling up to larger numbers is underway. However as the number of qubits in these processors increases, it becomes challenging to implement switchable or tunable coherent coupling among them. The typical approach has been to detune each qubit from others or the quantum bus it connected to, but as the number of qubits increases this becomes problematic to achieve in practice due to frequency crowding issues. Here, we demonstrate that by applying a fast longitudinal control field to the target qubit, we can turn off its couplings to other qubits or buses (in principle on/off ratio higher than 100 dB). This has important implementations in superconducting circuits as it means we can keep the qubits at their optimal points, where the coherence properties are greatest, during coupling/decoupling processing. Our approach suggests a new way to control coupling among qubits and data buses that can be naturally scaled up to large quantum processors without the need for auxiliary circuits and yet be free of the frequency crowding problems.
Macroscopic realism is the name for a class of modifications to quantum theory that allow macroscopic objects to be described in a measurement-independent fashion, while largely preservinga fully quantum mechanical description of the microscopic world. Objective collapse theories are examples which attempt to provide a physical mechanism for wavefunction collapse, and thereby aim to solve the quantum measurement problem. Here we describe and implement an experimental protocol capable of constraining theories of this class, and show how it is related to the original Leggett-Garg test, yet more noise tolerant and conceptually transparent. By conducting a set of simple ‚prepare, shuffle, measure‘ tests in a superconducting flux qubit, we rule out (by over 77 standard deviations) those theories which would deny coherent superpositions of 170 nA currents over a 9 ns timescale. Further, we address the ‚clumsiness loophole‘ by determining classical disturbance in a set of control experiments.
Ensembles of electron spins in hybrid microwave systems are powerful and versatile components for future quantum technologies. Quantum memories with high storage capacities are onesuch example which require long-lived states that can be addressed and manipulated coherently within the inhomogeneously broadened ensemble. This broadening is essential for true multimode memories, but induces a considerable spin dephasing and together with dissipation from a cavity interface poses a constraint on the memory’s storage time. In this work we show how to overcome both of these limitations through the engineering of long-lived dark states in an ensemble of electron spins hosted by nitrogen-vacancy centres in diamond. By burning narrow spectral holes into a spin ensemble strongly coupled to a superconducting microwave cavity, we observe long-lived Rabi oscillations with high visibility and a decay rate that is a factor of forty smaller than the spin ensemble linewidth and thereby a factor of more than three below the pure cavity dissipation rate. This significant reduction lives up to the promise of hybrid devices to perform better than their individual subcomponents. To demonstrate the potential of our approach we realise the first step towards a solid-state microwave spin multiplexer by engineering multiple long-lived dark states. Our results show that we can fully access the „decoherence free“ subspace in our experiment and selectively prepare protected states by spectral hole burning. This technique opens up the way for truly long-lived quantum memories, solid-state microwave frequency combs, optical to microwave quantum transducers and spin squeezed states. Our approach also paves the way for a new class of cavity QED experiments with dense spin ensembles, where dipole spin-spin interactions become important and many-body phenomena will be directly accessible on a chip.
We have built a hybrid system composed of a superconducting flux qubit (the processor) and an ensemble of nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond (the memory) that can be directly coupledto one another and demonstrated how information can be transferred from the flux qubit to the memory, stored and subsequently retrieved. We have established the coherence properties of the memory, and succeeded in creating an entangled state between the processor and memory, demonstrating how the entangled state’s coherence is preserved. Our results are a significant step towards using an electron spin ensemble as a quantum memory for superconducting qubits.