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arXiv:1507.02885 · Physical Review Letters

Antibunched Photons from Inelastic Cooper-Pair Tunneling

Juha Leppäkangas, M. Fogelström, Alexander Grimm, M. Hofheinz, Michael Marthaler, Göran Johansson

Published Jul 8, 2015• 46 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We demonstrate theoretically that charge transport across a Josephson junction, voltage-biased through a resistive environment, produces antibunched photons. We develop a continuous-mode description of the emitted radiation field in a semi-infinite transmission line terminated by the Josephson junction. Within a perturbative treatment in powers of the tunneling coupling across the Josephson junction, we capture effects originating in charging dynamics of consecutively tunneling Cooper pairs. We find that within a feasible experimental setup the Coulomb blockade provided by high zero-frequency impedance can be used to create antibunched photons at a very high rate and in a very versatile frequency window ranging from a few GHz to a THz.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.115.027004

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We explore the photonic (bright) side of the dynamical Coulomb blockade (DCB) by measuring the radiation emitted by a dc voltage-biased Josephson junction embedded in a microwave resonator. In this regime Cooper pair tunneling is inelastic and associated with the transfer of an energy 2eV into the resonator modes. We have measured simultaneously the Cooper pair current and the photon emission rate at the resonance frequency of the resonator. Our results show two regimes, in which each tunneling Cooper pair emits either one or two photons into the resonator. The spectral properties of the emitted radiation are accounted for by an extension to DCB theory.
Abstract We propose to generate photon-pair blockade in a Josephson-photonics circuit that consists of a dc voltage-biased Josephson junction in series with a superconducting charge qubit and two nondegenerate microwave resonators. The two-level charge qubit is utilized to create anticorrelations of the charge transport; that is, the simultaneous Cooper pair tunneling events are inhibited. When the Josephson frequency matches the sum of resonance frequencies of the charge qubit and the two resonators, we demonstrate that the two resonators can release their energies in the form of antibunched pairs of two strongly correlated photons. The present work provides a practical way for producing a bright microwave source of antibunched photon pairs, with potential applications ranging from spectroscopy and metrology to quantum information processing.
We propose an experimentally feasible scheme for generating antibunched NNN-photon bundles by a dc voltage-biased Josephson junction in series with a superconducting microwave resonator and a charge qubit. Each resonant tunneling Cooper pair leads to the excitation of the charge qubit and resonator with NNN photons simultaneously via the ac Josephson effect. Meanwhile, the charge qubit with strong anharmonicity is utilized to regulate the tunneling behavior of the Cooper pairs; that is, the presence of NNN photons in the resonator prevents the next tunnel event. So the resonator contains only NNN photons or none, and all other possibilities are greatly suppressed. Combined with the system's dissipation, the resonator can emit its energy in antibunched bundles of NNN strongly correlated photons with high purity and an in situ tunable emission rate. Such a nonclassical source could be useful in applications in the field of quantum information science.
Single-photon generation is an important proof of the underlying quantum nature of a physical process and a ubiquitous tool for scientific exploration, with applications ranging from spectroscopy and metrology to quantum computing.In the microwave regime, emission of antibunched radiation has so far relied on coherent control of Josephson qubits requiring precisely calibrated microwave pulses.In this work, we experimentally demonstrate the operation of a bright on-demand source of quantum microwave radiation driven by a simple dc voltage bias across a Josephson junction.Our source is based on photon emission into a microwave resonator through inelastic Cooper pair tunneling regulated by a high-impedance RC circuit preventing simultaneous tunnel events.It is characterized by its normalized second-order correlation function of g ð2Þ ð0Þ ≈ 0.43 corresponding to antibunching in the single-photon regime.Our device can be triggered, and its in situ tunable emission rate exceeds those obtained with current microwave singlephoton sources by more than 1 order of magnitude.
We analyze the quantum dynamics of two electromagnetic oscillators coupled in series to a voltage-biased Josephson junction. When the applied voltage leads to a Josephson frequency across the junction which matches the sum of the two mode frequencies, tunneling Cooper pairs excite photons in both modes simultaneously leading to far-from-equilibrium states. These states display highly nonclassical features including strong antibunching, violation of Cauchy-Schwartz inequalities, and number squeezing. We obtain approximate analytic results for both the regimes of low and high photon occupancies which are supported by a full numerical treatment. The impact of asymmetries between the two modes is explored, revealing a pronounced enhancement of number squeezing when the modes are damped at different rates.