Kitaev fermionic chain is one of the important physical models for studying topological physics and quantum computing. We here propose an approach to simulate the one-dimensional Kitaevmodel by a chain of superconducting qubit circuits. Furthermore, we study the environmental effect on topological quantum states of the Kitaev model. Besides the independent environment surrounding each qubit, we also consider the common environment shared by two nearest neighboring qubits. Such common environment can result in an effective non-Hermitian dissipative coupling between two qubits. Through theoretical analysis and numerical calculations, we show that the common environment can significantly change properties of topological states in contrast to the independent environment. In addition, we also find that dissipative couplings at the edges of the chain can be used to more easily tune the topological properties of the system than those at other positions. Our study may open a new way to explore topological quantum phase transition and various environmental effects on topological physics using superconducting qubit circuits.
We experimentally study a circuit quantum acoustodynamics system, which consists of a superconducting artificial atom, coupled to both a two-dimensional surface acoustic wave resonatorand a one-dimensional microwave transmission line. The strong coupling between the artificial atom and the acoustic wave resonator is confirmed by the observation of the vacuum Rabi splitting at the base temperature of dilution refrigerator. We show that the propagation of microwave photons in the microwave transmission line can be controlled by a few phonons in the acoustic wave resonator. Furthermore, we demonstrate the temperature effect on the measurements of the Rabi splitting and temperature induced transitions from high excited dressed states. We find that the spectrum structure of two-peak for the Rabi splitting becomes into those of several peaks, and gradually disappears with the increase of the environmental temperature T. The quantum-to-classical transition is observed around the crossover temperature Tc, which is determined via the thermal fluctuation energy kBT and the characteristic energy level spacing of the coupled system. Experimental results agree well with the theoretical simulations via the master equation of the coupled system at different effective temperatures.
We propose to periodically modulate the onsite energy via two-tone drives, which can be furthermore used to engineer artificial gauge potential. As an example, we show that the fermionicladder model penetrated with effective magnetic flux can be constructed by superconducting flux qubits using such two-tone-drive-engineered artificial gauge potential. In this superconducting system, the single-particle ground state can range from vortex phase to Meissner phase due to the competition between the interleg coupling strength and the effective magnetic flux. We also present the method to experimentally measure the chiral currents by the single-particle Rabi oscillations between adjacent qubits. In contrast to previous methods of generating artifical gauge potential, our proposal does not need the aid of auxiliary couplers and in principle remains valid only if the qubit circuit maintains enough anharmonicity. The fermionic ladder model with effective magnetic flux can also be interpreted as one-dimensional spin-orbit-coupled model, which thus lay a foundation towards the realization of quantum spin Hall effect.
Quantum Fourier transform (QFT) is a key ingredient of many quantum algorithms. In typical applications such as phase estimation, a considerable number of ancilla qubits and gates areused to form a Hilbert space large enough for high-precision results. Qubit recycling reduces the number of ancilla qubits to one, but it is only applicable to semi-classical QFT and requires repeated measurements and feedforward within the coherence time of the qubits. In this work, we explore a novel approach based on resonators that forms a high-dimensional Hilbert space for the realization of QFT. By employing the perfect state-transfer method, we map an unknown multi-qubit state to a single resonator, and obtain the QFT state in the second oscillator through cross-Kerr interaction and projective measurement. A quantitive analysis shows that our method allows for high-dimensional and fully-quantum QFT employing the state-of-the-art superconducting quantum circuits. This paves the way for implementing various QFT related quantum algorithms.
By coupling multiple artificial atoms simultaneously to two superconducting resonators, we construct a quantum switch that controls the resonator-resonator coupling strength from zeroto a large value proportional to the number of qubits. This process is implemented by switching the qubits among different \emph{subradiant states}, where the microwave photons decayed from different qubits interfere destructively so that the coupling strength keeps stable against environmental noise. Based on a two-step control scheme, the coupling strength can be switched at the \emph{nanosecond} scale while the qubits are maintained at the coherent optimal point. We also use the quantum switch to connect multiple resonators with a programmable network topology, and demonstrate its potential applications in quantum simulation and scalable quantum information storage and processing.
Topological insulators have inspired the study with various quantum simulators. Exploiting the tunability of the qubit frequency and qubit-qubit coupling, we show that a superconductingqubit chain can simulate various topological band models. When the system is restricted to the single-spin excitation subspace, the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model can be equivalently simulated by alternating the coupling strength between neighboring qubits. The existence of topological edge states in this qubit chain is demonstrated in the quench dynamics after the first qubit is excited. This excitation propagates along the chain where the qubit-qubit coupling is homogeneous. In contrast, in our qubit chain, the spin-up state localizes at the first qubit and the rest qubits remain in the spin-down state. We further show that the spin-up state can be transported along the chain by modulating the coupling strengths and the qubit frequencies. This demonstrates adiabatic pumping based on the Rice-Mele model. Moreover, we also discuss possible ways to construct other topological models with different topological phenomena within the current technology of superconducting qubits.
In the past 20 years, impressive progress has been made both experimentally and theoretically in superconducting quantum circuits, which provide a platform for manipulating microwavephotons. This emerging field of superconducting quantum microwave circuits has been driven by many new interesting phenomena in microwave photonics and quantum information processing. For instance, the interaction between superconducting quantum circuits and single microwave photons can reach the regimes of strong, ultra-strong, and even deep-strong coupling. Many higher-order effects, unusual and less familiar in traditional cavity quantum electrodynamics with natural atoms, have been experimentally observed, e.g., giant Kerr effects, multi-photon processes, and single-atom induced bistability of microwave photons. These developments may lead to improved understanding of the counterintuitive properties of quantum mechanics, and speed up applications ranging from microwave photonics to superconducting quantum information processing. In this article, we review experimental and theoretical progress in microwave photonics with superconducting quantum circuits. We hope that this global review can provide a useful roadmap for this rapidly developing field.
We study experimentally a vacuum induced Aulter-Townes doublet in a superconducting three-level artificial atom strongly coupled to a coplanar waveguide resonator and simultaneouslyto a transmission line. The Aulter-Townes splitting is observed in the reflection spectrum of the three-level atom when the transition between two excited states is resonant with the resonator. By varying an amplitude of the driving field applied to the resonator, we observe quantum-to-classical transition of the Aulter-Townes splitting. Our results may pave the way for the control of microwaves by single photons.
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.
Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) has been extensively studied in various systems. However, it is not easy to observe in superconducting quantum circuits (SQCs), becausethe Rabi frequency of the strong controlling field corresponding to EIT is limited by the decay rates of the SQCs. Here, we show that EIT can be achieved by engineering decay rates in a superconducting circuit QED system through a classical driving field on the qubit. Without such a driving field, the superconducting qubit and the cavity field are approximately decoupled in the large detuning regime, and thus the eigenstates of the system are approximately product states of the cavity field and qubit states. However, the driving field can strongly mix these product states and so-called polariton states can be formed. The weights of the states for the qubit and cavity field in the polariton states can be tuned by the driving field, and thus the decay rates of the polariton states can be changed. We choose a three-level system with Λ-type transitions in such a driven circuit QED system, and demonstrate how EIT and ATS can be realized in this compound system. We believe that this study will be helpful for EIT experiments using SQCs.