Latest Papers

Superconducting qubits connected in an array can form quantum many-body systems such as the quantum Ising model. By coupling the qubits to a superconducting resonator, the combined system forms a circuit QED system. Here, we study the nonlinear behavior in the many-body state of the qubit array using a semiclassical approach. We show that sudden switchings as well as a bistable regime between the ferromagnetic phase and the paramagnetic phase can be observed in the qubit array. A superconducting circuit to implement this system is presented with realistic parameters .

We propose a scheme for the quantum non-demolition (QND) measurement of Fock states of a nanomechanical resonator via feedback control of a coupled circuit QED system. A Cooper pair box (CPB) is coupled to both the nanoresonator and microwave cavity. The CPB is read-out via homodyne detection on the cavity and feedback control is used to effect a non-dissipative measurement of the CPB. This realizes an indirect QND measurement of the nanoresonator via a second-order coupling of the CPB to the nanoresonator number operator. The phonon number of the Fock state may be determined by integrating the stochastic master equation derived, or by processing of the measurement signal.

A scheme for coupling superconducting charge qubits via a one-dimensional superconducting transmission line resonator is proposed. The qubits are working at their optimal points, where they are immune to the charge noise and possess long decoherence time. Analysis on the dynamical time evolution of the interaction is presented, which is shown to be insensitive to the initial state of the resonator field. This scheme enables fast gate operation and is readily scalable to multiqubit scenario.

We study thermal entanglement in a two-superconducting-qubit system in two cases, either identical or distinct. By calculating the concurrence of system, we find that the entangled degree of the system is greatly enhanced in the case of very low temperature and Josephson energies for the identical superconducting qubits, and our result is in a good agreement with the experimental data.

Superconducting quantum circuits possess the ingredients for quantum information processing and for developing on-chip microwave quantum optics. From the initial manipulation of few-level superconducting systems (qubits) to their strong coupling to microwave resonators, the time has come to consider the generation and characterization of propagating quantum microwaves. In this paper, we design a key ingredient that will prove essential in the general frame: a swtichable coupling between qubit(s) and transmission line(s) that can work in the ultrastrong coupling regime, where the coupling strength approaches the qubit transition frequency. We propose several setups where two or more loops of Josephson junctions are directly connected to a closed (cavity) or open transmission line. We demonstrate that the circuit induces a coupling that can be modulated in strength and type. Given recent studies showing the accessibility to the ultrastrong regime, we expect our ideas to have an immediate impact in ongoing experiments.

We study the Zeno and anti-Zeno effects in a superconducting qubit interacting strongly and ultrastrongly with a microwave resonator. Using a model of a frequently measured two-level system interacting with a quantized mode, we show different behaviors and total control of the Zeno times depending on whether the rotating-wave approximation can be applied in the Jaynes-Cummings model, or not. We exemplify showing the strong dependence of our results with the properties of the initial field states and suggest applications for quantum tomography.

We report the measurement of the fluctuations of a transmon qubit through the noise spectrum of the microwave signal that measures its state. The amplitude of the Lorentzian noise power spectrum allows to determine the average qubit excitation, in agreement with the estimated thermal radiation reaching the sample. Its width yields the qubit energy relaxation rate which decreases with temperature, contrary to the predictions for a two-level system solely coupled to thermal radiation. This indicates the existence of another non-radiative energy relaxation channel for the qubit.

The cluster state quantum computation is a versatile approach to build a scalable quantum computer. In this thesis we theoretically demonstrate that a one dimensional array of double quantum dots with long spin relaxation time can evolve to a cluster state via capacitive coupling to a transmission line resonator. By applying an oscillating voltage to gates of the double quantum dots, we prove that the evolution operator for such interaction is an Ising-like operator. Subsequently, the interacting qubits will become highly entangled that we realize a cluster state. Furthermore, we propose an experiment to investigate validity of our theoretical method. Considering the current advanced technology in semiconductor nanofabrication, our proposed structure can be integrated on a chip where provides scalability and convenient control of the qubits. The scalability of our scheme implies that we can expand this structure to higher dimensional arrays of the qubits where paves the way for further experimental investigation on the theory of measurement-based quantum computation.

Electromagnetically induced transparency and absorption (EIT and EIA) are usually demonstrated by three-level atomic or atom-like systems. In contrast to the usual case, we theoretically study the EIT and EIA in an equivalent three-level system, which is constructed by dressing a superconducting two-level system (qubit) dressed by a single-mode cavity field. In this equivalent system, we find that both the EIT and the EIA can be tuned by controlling the level-spacing of the superconducting qubit and hence controlling the dressed system. This tunability is due to the dressed relaxation and dephasing rates which vary parametrically with the level-spacing of the original qubit and thus affect the transition properties of the dressed qubit and the susceptibility. These dressed relaxation and dephasing rates characterize the reaction of the dressed qubit to an incident probe field. We also use recent experimental data on superconducting qubits (charge, phase, and flux qubits) to demonstrate our approach and show the possibility of experimentally realizing this proposal.

We consider two Jaynes-Cummings cavities coupled periodically with a photon hopping term. The semi-classical phase space is chaotic, with regions of stability over some ranges of the parameters. The quantum case exhibits dynamic localization and dynamic tunneling between classically forbidden regions. We explore the correspondence between the classical and quantum phase space and propose a scheme for implementing the system experimentally.

Optimal control can be used to significantly improve multi-qubit gates in quantum information processing hardware architectures based on superconducting circuit quantum electrodynamics. We apply this approach not only to dispersive gates of two qubits inside a cavity, but, more generally, to architectures based on two-dimensional arrays of cavities and qubits. For high-fidelity gate operations, simultaneous evolutions of controls and couplings in the two coupling dimensions of cavity grids are shown to be significantly faster than conventional sequential implementations. Even under experimentally realistic conditions speedups by a factor of three can be gained. The methods immediately scale to large grids and indirect gates between arbitrary pairs of qubits on the grid. They are anticipated to be paradigmatic for 2D arrays and lattices of controllable qubits.

The exceptionally strong coupling realizable between superconducting qubits and photons stored in an on-chip microwave resonator allows for the detailed study of matter-light interactions in the realm of circuit quantum electrodynamics (QED). Here we investigate the resonant interaction between a single transmon-type multilevel artificial atom and weak thermal and coherent fields. We explore up to three photon dressed states of the coupled system in a linear response heterodyne transmission measurement. The results are in good quantitative agreement with a generalized Jaynes-Cummings model. Our data indicates that the role of thermal fields in resonant cavity QED can be studied in detail using superconducting circuits.

We present a theoretical treatment for the dissipative two-resonator circuit quantum electrodynamics setup referred to as quantum switch. There, switchable coupling between two superconducting resonators is mediated by a superconducting qubit operating in the dispersive regime, where the qubit transition frequency is far detuned from those of the resonators. We derive an effective Hamiltonian for the quantum switch beyond the rotating wave approximation and study the dissipative dynamics within a Bloch-Redfield quantum master equation approach. We derive analytically how the qubit affects the quantum switch even if the qubit has no dynamics, and we estimate the strength of this influence. The analytical results are corroborated by numerical calculations, where coherent oscillations between the resonators, the decay of coherent and Fock states, and the decay of resonator-resonator entanglement are studied. Finally, we suggest an experimental protocol for extracting the damping constants of qubit and resonators by measuring the quadratures of the resonator fields.

We propose a one-step scheme to generate GHZ states for superconducting flux qubits or charge qubits in a circuit QED setup. The GHZ state can be produced within the coherence time of the multi-qubit system. Our scheme is independent of the initial state of the transmission line resonator and works in the presence of higher harmonic modes. Our analysis also shows that the scheme is robust to various operation errors and environmental noise.

An electron floating on the liquid Helium is proposed to be trapped (by a micro-electrode set below the liquid Helium) in a high finesse cavity. Two lowest levels of the vertical motion of the electron acts as a two-level "atom", which could resonantly interact with the THz cavity. In the Lamb-Dicke regime, wherein the electron's in-plane activity region is much smaller than the wavelength of the cavity mode, the famous Jaynes-Cummings model (JCM) could be realized. By applying an additional external classical laser beam to the electron, a driven JCM could also be implemented. With such a driven JCM certain quantum states, e.g., coherent states and the Schrodinger cat states, of the THz cavity field could be prepared by one-step evolution. The numerical results show that, for the typical parameters of the cavity and electron on liquid Helium, a strong coupling between the artificial atom and the THz cavity could be obtained.

We investigate theoretically the quantum vacuum properties of a chain of $N$ superconducting Josephson atoms inductively coupled to a transmission line resonator. We derive the quantum field Hamiltonian for such circuit-QED system, showing that, due to the type and strength of the interaction, a quantum phase transition can occur with a twice degenerate quantum vacuum above a critical coupling. In the finite-size case, the degeneracy is lifted, with an energy splitting decreasing exponentially with increasing values of $g^2 N^2$, where $g$ is the dimensionless vacuum Rabi coupling per artificial atom. We determine analytically the ultrastrong coupling asymptotic expression of the two degenerate vacua for an arbitrary number of artificial atoms and of resonator modes. In the ultrastrong coupling regime the degeneracy is protected with respect to random fluctuations of the transition energies of the Josephson elements.

For multiphoton intensity-dependent Jaynes-Cummings model (JCM), which is described by two-level atom interacting with a radiation field, we prove that there is a relationship between the atomic inversion and the quadrature squeezing. We give the required condition to obtain best information from this relation. Also we show that this relation is only sensitive to large values of the detuning parameter. Furthermore, we discuss briefly such relation for the off-resonance standard JCM.

Jaynes-Cummings model is a typical model in quantum optics and has been realized with various physical systems (e.g, cavity QED, trapped ions, and circuit QED etc..) of two-level atoms interacting with quantized bosonic fields. Here, we propose a new implementation of this model by using a single classical laser beam to drive an electron floating on liquid Helium. Two lowest levels of the {\it vertical} motion of the electron acts as a two-level "atom", and the quantized vibration of the electron along one of the {\it parallel} directions, e.g., $x$-direction, serves the bosonic mode. These two degrees of freedom of the trapped electron can be coupled together by using a classical laser field. If the frequencies of the applied laser fields are properly set, the desirable Jaynes-Cummings models could be effectively realized.

We propose the implementation of fast resonant gates in circuit quantum electrodynamics for quantum information processing. We show how a suitable utilization of three-level superconducting qubits inside a resonator constitutes a key tool to perform diverse two-qubit resonant gates, improving the operation speed when compared to slower dispersive techniques. To illustrate the benefit of resonant two-qubit gates in circuit QED, we consider the implementation of a two-dimensional cluster state in an array of N x N superconducting qubits by using resonant controlled-phase (CPHASE) and one-qubit gates, where the generation time grows linearly with N. For N=3, and taking into account decoherence mechanisms, a fidelity over 60% for the generation of this cluster state is obtained.

In this paper we discuss the quantum properties for superposition of squeezed displaced number states against multiphoton Jaynes-Cummings model (JCM). In particular, we investigate atomic inversion, photon-number distribution, purity, quadrature squeezing, Mandel $Q$ parameter and Wigner function. We show that the quadrature squeezing for three-photon absorption case can exhibit revivals and collapses typical to those occurring in the atomic inversion for one-photon absorption case. Also we prove that for odd number absorption parameter there is a connection between the evolution of the atomic inversion and the evolution of the Wigner function at the origin in phase space. Furthermore, we show that the nonclassical states whose the Wigner functions values at the origins are negative will be always nonclassical when they are evolving through the JCM with even absorption parameter. Also we demonstrate that various types of cat states can be generated via this system.