Latest Papers

We examine the possibility of coherent, reversible information transfer between solid-state superconducting qubits and ensembles of ultra-cold atoms. Strong coupling between these systems is mediated by a microwave transmission line resonator that interacts near-resonantly with the atoms via their optically excited Rydberg states. The solid-state qubits can then be used to implement rapid quantum logic gates, while collective metastable states of the atoms can be employed for long-term storage and optical read-out of quantum information.

The very small size of optical nonlinearities places wide ranging restrictions on the types of novel physics one can explore. For an ensemble of multi-level systems one can synthesize a large effective optical nonlinearity using quantum coherence effects but such non-linearities are technically extremely challenging to demonstrate at the single atom level. In this work we describe how a single artificial multi-level Cooper Pair Box molecule, interacting with a superconducting microwave coplanar waveguide resonator, when suitably driven, can generate extremely large optical nonlinearities at microwave frequencies, with no associated absorption. We describe how the giant self-Kerr effect can be detected by measuring the second-order correlation function and quadrature squeezing spectrum.

In this paper, the non-Markovian dissipative dynamics of the phase damped Jaynes-Cummings model in the presence of a classical homogeneous gravitational field will be analyzed. The model consists of a moving two-level atom simultaneously exposed to the gravitational field and a single-mode traveling radiation field in the presence of a non-Markovian phase damping mechanism. First, the non-Markovian master equation for the reduced density operator of the system in terms of a Hamiltonian describing the atom-field interaction in the presence of a homogeneous gravitational field will be presented. Then, the super-operator technique will be generalized and an exact solution of the non-Markovian master equation will be obtained. Assuming that initially the radiation field is prepared in a Glauber coherent state and the two-level atom is in the excited state, the non-Markovian effects on the temporal evolution of collapses and revivals of the atomic population inversion and photon counting statistics of the radiation field in the presence of both the phase damping and a homogeneous gravitational field will be investigated.

The effective mass that approximately describes the effect of a classical homogeneous gravitational field on an interacting atom-radiation field system is determined within the framework of the Jaynes-Cummings model. By taking into account both the atomic motion and gravitational field, a full quantum treatment of the internal and external dynamics of the atom is presented. By solving exactly the Schrodinger equation in the interaction picture, the evolving state of the system is found. Influence of a classical homogeneous gravitational field on the energy eigenvalues, the effective mass of atom-radiation field system and the Wigner distribution of the radiation field are studied, when initially the radiation field is prepared in a coherent state and the two-level atom is in a coherent superposition of the excited and ground states.

In this paper, we give an analytical treatment to study the behavior of the collapse and the revival of the Rabi oscillations in the Jaynes-Cummings model (JCM). The JCM is an exactly soluble quantum mechanical model, which describes the interaction between a two-level atom and a single cavity mode of the electromagnetic field. If we prepare the atom in the ground state and the cavity mode in a coherent state initially, the JCM causes the collapse and the revival of the Rabi oscillations many times in a complicated pattern in its time-evolution. In this phenomenon, the atomic population inversion is described with an intractable infinite series. (When the electromagnetic field is resonant with the atom, the $n$th term of this infinite series is given by a trigonometric function for $\sqrt{n}t$, where $t$ is a variable of the time.) According to Klimov and Chumakov's method, using the Abel-Plana formula, we rewrite this infinite series as a sum of two integrals. We examine the physical meanings of these two integrals and find that the first one represents the initial collapse (the semi-classical limit) and the second one represents the revival (the quantum correction) in the JCM. Furthermore, we evaluate the first and second-order perturbations for the time-evolution of the JCM with an initial thermal coherent state for the cavity mode at low temperature, and write down their correction terms as sums of integrals by making use of the Abel-Plana formula.

We present spectroscopic measurements of the Autler-Townes doublet and the sidebands of the Mollow triplet in a driven superconducting qubit. The ground to first excited state transition of the qubit is strongly pumped while the resulting dressed qubit spectrum is probed with a weak tone. The corresponding transitions are detected using dispersive read-out of the qubit coupled off-resonantly to a microwave transmission line resonator. The observed frequencies of the Autler-Townes and Mollow spectral lines are in good agreement with a dispersive Jaynes-Cummings model taking into account higher excited qubit states and dispersive level shifts due to off-resonant drives.

We present an ideal realization of the Tavis-Cummings model in the absence of atom number and coupling fluctuations by embedding a discrete number of fully controllable superconducting qubits at fixed positions into a transmission line resonator. Measuring the vacuum Rabi mode splitting with one, two and three qubits strongly coupled to the cavity field, we explore both bright and dark dressed collective multi-qubit states and observe the discrete square root of N scaling of the collective dipole coupling strength. Our experiments demonstrate a novel approach to explore collective states, such as the W-state, in a fully globally and locally controllable quantum system. Our scalable approach is interesting for solid-state quantum information processing and for fundamental multi-atom quantum optics experiments with fixed atom numbers.

We suggest a scheme to probe critical phenomena at a quantum phase transition (QPT) using the quantum correlation of two photonic modes simultaneously coupled to a critical system. As an experimentally accessible physical implementation, a circuit QED system is formed by a capacitively coupled Josephson junction qubit array interacting with one superconducting transmission line resonator (TLR). It realizes an Ising chain in the transverse field (ICTF) which interacts with the two magnetic modes propagating in the TLR. We demonstrate that in the vicinity of criticality the originally independent fields tend to display photon bunching effects due to their interaction with the ICTF. Thus, the occurrence of the QPT is reflected by the quantum characteristics of the photonic fields.

We study theoretically the nonstationary circuit QED system in which the artificial atom transition frequency, or the atom-cavity coupling, have a small periodic time modulation, prescribed externally. The system formed by the atom coupled to a single cavity mode is described by the Rabi Hamiltonian. We show that, in the dispersive regime, when the modulation periodicity is tuned to the `resonances', the system dynamics presents the dynamical Casimir effect, resonant Jaynes-Cummings or resonant Anti-Jaynes-Cummings behaviors, and it can be described by the corresponding effective Hamiltonians. In the resonant atom-cavity regime and under the resonant modulation, the dynamics is similar to the one occurring for a stationary two-level atom in a vibrating cavity, and an entangled state with two photons can be created from vacuum. Moreover, we consider the situation in which the atom-cavity coupling, the atomic frequency, or both have a small nonperiodic time modulation, and show that photons can be created from vacuum in the dispersive regime. Therefore, an analog of the dynamical Casimir effect can be simulated in circuit QED, and several photons, as well as entangled states, can be generated from vacuum due to the anti-rotating term in the Rabi Hamiltonian.

In this paper we derive an effective master equation and quantum trajectory equation for multiple qubits in a single resonator and in the large resonator decay limit. We show that homodyne measurement of the resonator transmission is a weak measurement of the collective qubit inversion. As an example of this result, we focus on the case of two qubits and show how this measurement can be used to generate an entangled state from an initially separable state. This is realized without relying on an entangling Hamiltonian. We show that, for {\em current} experimental values of both the decoherence and measurement rates, this approach can be used to generate highly entangled states. This scheme takes advantage of the fact that one of the Bell states is decoherence-free under Purcell decay.

Quantum optical photodetection has occupied a central role in understanding radiation-matter interactions. It has also contributed to the development of atomic physics and quantum optics, including applications to metrology, spectroscopy, and quantum information processing. The quantum microwave regime, originally explored using cavities and atoms, is seeing a novel boost with the generation of nonclassical propagating fields in circuit quantum electrodynamics (QED). This promising field, involving potential developments in quantum information with microwave photons, suffers from the absence of photodetectors. Here, we design a metamaterial composed of discrete superconducting elements that implements a high-efficiency microwave photon detector. Our design consists of a microwave guide coupled to an array of metastable quantum circuits, whose internal states are irreversibly changed due to the absorption of photons. This proposal can be widely applied to different physical systems and can be generalized to implement a microwave photon counter.

he Jaynes-Cummings model (JCM) is an very important model for describing interaction between quantized electromagnetic fields and atoms in cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED). This model is generalized in many different direction since it predicts many novel quantum effects that can be verified by modern physics experimental technologies. In this paper, the Berry phase and entropy of the ground state for arbitrary photon number $n$ of a two-atom Jaynes-Cummings model with Kerr like medium are investigated. It is found that there are some correspondence between their images, especially the existence of a curve in the $Δ-\varepsilon$ plane along which the energy, Berry phase and entropy all reach their special values. So it is available for detecting entanglement by applying Berry phase.

A detailed treatment of the entanglement dynamics of two distant but non-identical systems is presented. We study the entanglement evolution of two remote atoms interacting independently with a cavity field, as in the double Jaynes-Cummings (JC) model. The four-qubit pairwise concurrences are studied, allowing for asymmetric atom-cavity couplings and off-resonant ineractions. Counter to intuition, imperfect matching can prove advantageous to entanglement creation and evolution. For two types of initial entanglement, corresponding to spin correlated and anti-correlated Bell states Φand Ψ, a full, periodic and directed transfer of entanglement into a specific qubit pair is possible, for resonant interactions, depending on the choice of relative couplings. Furthermore, entanglement transfer and sudden death (ESD) can be prevented using off-resonant interactions, although for some initial states, detunings will trigger an otherwise frozen entanglement, to allow a full entanglement transfer. We confirm a conservation rule governing the pairwise entanglement between the non-interacting systems, that for the initial state Ψthe sum of the square of these concurrences (SSC) is conserved. For Φ, the total SSC is reduced periodically, even to zero in some cases, to reveal a complete and abrupt loss of all non-local pairwise entanglement.

Superconducting electrical circuits can be used to study the physics of cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) in new regimes, therefore realizing circuit QED. For quantum information processing and quantum optics, an interesting regime of circuit QED is the dispersive regime, where the detuning between the qubit transition frequency and the resonator frequency is much larger than the interaction strength. In this paper, we investigate how non-linear corrections to the dispersive regime affect the measurement process. We find that in the presence of pure qubit dephasing, photon population of the resonator used for the measurement of the qubit act as an effective heat bath, inducing incoherent relaxation and excitation of the qubit. Measurement thus induces both dephasing and mixing of the qubit, something that can reduce the quantum non-demolition aspect of the readout. Using quantum trajectory theory, we show that this heat bath can induce quantum jumps in the qubit state and reduce the achievable signal-to-noise ratio of a homodyne measurement of the voltage.

In this paper, we propose a method for building a two-qubit gate with the Jaynes-Cummings model (JCM). In our scheme, we construct a qubit from a pair of optical paths where a photon is running. Generating Knill, Laflamme and Milburn's nonlinear sign-shift gate by the JCM, we construct the conditional sign-flip gate, which works with small error probability in principle. We also discuss two experimental setups for realizing our scheme. In the first experimental setup, we make use of coherent lights to examine whether or not our scheme works. In the second experimental setup, an optical loop circuit made out of the polarizing beam splitter and the Pockels cell takes an important role in the cavity.

We propose the use of a superconducting charge qubit capacitively coupled to two resonant nanomechanical resonators to generate Yurke-Stoler states, i.e. quantum superpositions of pairs of distinguishable coherent states 180$^\circ$ out of phase with each other. This is achieved by effectively implementing Kerr nonlinearities induced through application of a strong external driving field in one of the resonators. A simple study of the effect of dissipation on our scheme is also presented, and lower bounds of fidelity and purity of the generated state are calculated. Our procedure to implement a Kerr nonlinearity in this system may be used for high precision measurements in nanomechanical resonators.

When a two-qubit system is initially maximally-entangled, two independent decoherence channels, one per qubit, would greatly reduce the entanglement of the two-qubit system when it reaches its stationary state. We propose a method on how to minimize such a loss of entanglement in open quantum systems. We find that the quantum entanglement of general two-qubit systems with controllable parameters can be protected by tuning both the single-qubit parameters and the two-qubit coupling strengths. Indeed, the maximum fidelity $F_{\rm max}$ between the stationary entangled state, $ρ_{\infty}$, and the maximally-entangled state, $ρ_m$, can be about $2/3\approx\max\{{\rm tr}(ρ_{\infty}ρ_m)\}=F_{\rm max}$, corresponding to a maximum stationary concurrence, $C_{\rm max}$, of about $1/3\approx C(ρ_{\infty})=C_{\rm max}$. This is significant because the quantum entanglement of the two-qubit system can be protected, even for a long time. We apply our proposal to several types of two-qubit superconducting circuits, and show how the entanglement of these two-qubit circuits can be optimized by varying experimentally-controllable parameters.

We investigate the influence of temperature and dissipation on the Landau-Zener transition probability in circuit QED. Dissipation is modelled by coupling the transmission line to a bath of harmonic oscillators. The reduced description for the density operator is treated within Bloch-Redfield theory. A phase-space representation allows an efficient numerical implementation of the resulting master equation. It provides reliable results which are valid even for rather low temperatures. We find that the spin-flip probability as a function of temperature and dissipation strength exhibits a non-monotonic behaviour. Our numerical results are complemented by analytical solutions for zero temperature and for vanishing dissipation strength.

We report the observation of quantum jumps between macroscopic quantum states in a superconducting phase qubit coupled to the two-level systems in the Josephson tunnel junction, and all key features of quantum jumps are confirmed in the experiments. Moreover, quantum jumps can be used to calibrate such two-level systems, which are believed to be one of the main decoherence sources in Josephson devices.

We study theoretically the non-stationary circuit QED system in which the artificial atom transition frequency has a small periodic modulation in time, prescribed externally. We show that, in the dispersive regime, when the modulation periodicity meets the `resonances', the dynamics may be described by the dynamical Casimir effect, Jaynes-Cummings or Anti-Jaynes-Cummings effective Hamiltonians. In the resonant atom-cavity regime, under the modulation `resonance' the dynamics resembles the behavior of the dynamical Casimir effect in a vibrating cavity containing a resonant two-level atom, and entangled states with two photons can be created from vacuum. Thus, an analog of the dynamical Casimir effect may be simulated in circuit QED, and several photons, as well as entangled states, can be generated from vacuum due to the anti-rotating term in the Rabi Hamiltonian.