In this work we propose two protocols to make an effective gauge potential for microwave photons in circuit QED. The first scheme is based on coupled transmons whose on-site energies are harmonically modulated in time. We investigate the effect of various types of capacitive and inductive couplings, and the role of the phase difference between adjacent sites on creating a complex hopping rate between coupled qubits. The second method relies on the parametrically coupling the modes of a SQUID in a resonator and controlling the hopping phase via a coherent pump. Both proposals can be readily realized in a superconducting circuit with the existing technology and are suitable for scalable lattices. As an example benefiting from these complex-valued hopping terms, we simulated the behavior of a plaquette of bosonic Creutz ladder as one of the important models with interdisciplinary interest in various branches of physics. Our results clearly show the emergence of chiral edge modes and directional transport between lattice sites. Combined with intrinsic nonlinearity of the transmon qubits such lattices would be an ideal platform for simulating many different Hamiltonians such as the Bose--Hubbard model with nontrivial gauge fields. Important direct applications of the presented results span a broad range from signal processing in nonreciprocal transport to quantum simulation of gauge-invariant models in fundamental physics.
In this work we propose two protocols to make an effective gauge potential for microwave photons in circuit QED. The first scheme is based on coupled transmons whose on-site energies are harmonically modulated in time. We investigate the effect of various types of capacitive and inductive couplings, and the role of the phase difference between adjacent sites on creating a complex hopping rate between coupled qubits. The second method relies on the parametrically coupling the modes of a SQUID in a resonator and controlling the hopping phase via a coherent pump. Both proposals can be readily realized in a superconducting circuit with the existing technology and are suitable for scalable lattices. As an example benefiting from these complex-valued hopping terms, we simulated the behavior of a plaquette of bosonic Creutz ladder as one of the important models with interdisciplinary interest in various branches of physics. Our results clearly show the emergence of chiral edge modes and directional transport between lattice sites. Combined with intrinsic nonlinearity of the transmon qubits such lattices would be an ideal platform for simulating many different Hamiltonians such as the Bose--Hubbard model with nontrivial gauge fields. Important direct applications of the presented results span a broad range from signal processing in nonreciprocal transport to quantum simulation of gauge-invariant models in fundamental physics.
The concept of flat band plays an important role in strongly correlated many-body physics. However, the demonstration of the flat band physics is highly nontrivial due to intrinsic limitations in conventional condensed-matter materials. Here we propose a circuit quantum electrodynamics simulator of the two-dimensional (2D) Lieb lattice exhibiting a flat middle band. By exploiting the parametric conversion method, we design a photonic Lieb lattice with in situ tunable hopping strengths in a 2D array of coupled superconducting transmissionline resonators. Moreover, the flexibility of our proposal enables the incorporation of both the artificial gauge field and the strong photon-photon interaction in a time- and site-resolved manner. To unambiguously demonstrate the synthesized flat band, we further investigate the observation of the flat band localization of microwave photons through the pumping and the steady-state measurements of only a few sites on the lattice. Requiring only current level of technique and being robust against imperfections in realistic circuits, our scheme can be readily tested in experiment and may pave a new way towards the realization of exotic photonic quantum Hall fluids including anomalous quantum Hall effect and bosonic fractional quantum Hall effect without magnetic field.
I describe a lattice of asymmetrical qubit pairs in arbitrary dimension, with couplings arranged so that the motion of single-qubit excited states mimics the behavior of charged lattice bosons hopping in a magnetic field. I show, in particular, that one can choose the parameters of the many-body circuit to reach a regime where the complex hopping phase between any two elements can be tuned to any value by simply adjusting the relative phases of two applied oscillating voltage signals. I also propose specific realizations of our model using coupled three junction flux qubits or transmon qubits, in which one can reach the strongly interacting bosonic quantum Hall limit where one will find anyonic excitations. This model could also be studied in trapped ions, and the superconducting circuits could be used for topological quantum computation.
Superconducting quantum circuits are a natural platform for quantum simulations of a wide variety of important lattice models describing topological phenomena, spanning condensed matter and high-energy physics. One such model is the bosonic analog of the well-known fermionic Kitaev chain, a 1D tight-binding model with both nearest-neighbor hopping and pairing terms. Despite being fully Hermitian, the bosonic Kitaev chain exhibits a number of striking features associated with non-Hermitian systems, including chiral transport and a dramatic sensitivity to boundary conditions known as the non-Hermitian skin effect. Here, using a multimode superconducting parametric cavity, we implement the bosonic Kitaev chain in synthetic dimensions. The lattice sites are mapped to frequency modes of the cavity, and the in situ tunable complex hopping and pairing terms are created by parametric pumping at the mode-difference and mode-sum frequencies, respectively. We experimentally demonstrate important precursors of nontrivial topology and the non-Hermitian skin effect in the bosonic Kitaev chain, including chiral transport, quadrature wavefunction localization, and sensitivity to boundary conditions. Our experiment is an important first step towards exploring genuine many-body non-Hermitian quantum dynamics.
Gauge theories and topological phases play a fundamental role in different areas of physics. The first ones are at the basis of the Standard Model in the field of particle physics, describing the electroweak and strong interactions through a non-Abelian gauge theory. In condensed matter and statistical physics, gauge theories arise as low-energy effective descriptions of strongly correlated phenomena, such as quantum spin liquids and quantum Hall effect. In this realm there is a strong connection with topological phases and order, as emergent gauge fermions and bosons often describe collective excitations of new exotic states of matter of spin models. The discretization on a lattice is a possible way of dealing with the strongly coupled nature of these theories, due to the fact that this formulation at finite volume provides natural regularizing cut-offs, i.e. the lattice size and spacing. This allows for the investigation of different non-perturbative properties both numerically and analytically. Despite the success of these methods, there are various aspects which remain intractable due to the sign or complex action problems, like the out of equilibrium real time evolution or the analysis of quantum chromodynamics with finite chemical potential. In this respect, quantum simulators of many-body systems to simulate high energy physics arise as promising alternatives to face these problems in the near future. They are quantum systems that can be controlled and used to simulate more complicated systems, whose properties could not be analysed with classical computational, experimental or theoretical tools. In the last decades, there has been a huge development in the fields of quantum optics and atomic physics, allowing for the realization highly precise and controllable platforms by means of trapped ions, superconducting circuits, Rydberg atoms and ultracold atoms in optical lattices. This work of Thesis is part of these fields and has different purposes, all of them connected with the study of gauge theories and topological phases. Firstly, we want to develop a reformulation of lattice gauge theories in terms of gauge invariant fields, in a way to deal solely with physical variables directly in the action. Among several possible advantages, a crucial point is that this can be particularly helpful for the construction of consistent approximation schemes, such as mean-field theories, in order to understand and capture some of the physical features of the theory and make the mean-field approximation consistent with the Elitzur theorem, stating that a local gauge symmetry can not be spontaneously broken. As a second point, we face the problem of simulating higher dimensional gauge theories with ultracold atoms. One of the challenges in more than one dimension is indeed the realization of plaquette interaction terms in the Hamiltonian of lattice gauge theories: these can be engineered through four correlated hoppings in perturbation theory, or by means of constrained hoppings in the dual formulation. In this respect, our main target is to set up an ultracold atomic platform generating the plaquette term in two dimensions using only two correlated hoppings, and protecting gauge invariance through angular momentum conservation. The last point we address in the Thesis is related to the analysis of particles moving in static background gauge potentials, i.e. when the considered gauge field has no dynamical term in the action of the system. Indeed, the dynamics of quantum particles in the presence of static gauge fields gives rise to intriguing physical phenomena. In particular, using ultracold atom setups, the realization of artificial gauge potentials can be used to investigate the physics of topological semimetals, such as Weyl or Dirac type. In the last ten years, a lot of attention has been paid to their characterization, due to the appearence of clear theoretical predictions and very well-controlled experimental techniques. We investigate here the relation between topological phase transitions and van Hove singularities, i.e. the discontinuities in the energy derivative of the density of states, in three-dimensional gapless systems. In such materials, topological phase transitions can be defined by changes of the topological invariants of the Fermi sheets, happening at specific singular points. Moreover, Fermi surface singularities result in the presence of the so-called van Hove points. We then present a general argument to relate topological phase transitions and van Hove singularities, and show observable consequences that are related to the transport properties of the system. We exemplify our argument in Weyl systems by analyzing the three-dimensional Hofstadter model for various commensurate fluxes, which offers the opportunity to consider different kinds of Weyl metals and to understand the features of their density of states.
Historically our understanding of the microscopic world has been impeded by limitations in systems that behave classically. Even today, understanding simple problems in quantum mechanics remains a difficult task both computationally and experimentally. As a means of overcoming these classical limitations, the idea of using a controllable quantum system to simulate a less controllable quantum system has been proposed. This concept is known as quantum simulation and is the origin of the ideas behind quantum computing. In this thesis, experiments have been conducted that address the feasibility of using devices with a circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) architecture as a quantum simulator. In a cQED device, a superconducting qubit is capacitively coupled to a superconducting resonator resulting in coherent quantum behavior of the qubit when it interacts with photons inside the resonator. It has been shown theoretically that by forming a lattice of cQED elements, different quantum phases of photons will exist for dierent system parameters. In order to realize such a quantum simulator, the necessary experimental foundation must rst be developed. Here experimental eorts were focused on addressing two primary issues: 1) designing and fabricating low disorder lattices that are readily available to incorporate superconducting qubits, and 2) developing new measurement tools and techniques that can be used to characterize large lattices, and probe the predicted quantum phases within the lattice. Three experiments addressing these issues were performed. In the rst experiment a Kagome lattice of transmission line resonators was designed and fabricated, and a comprehensive study on the effects of random disorder in the lattice demonstrated that disorder was dependent on the resonator geometry. Subsequently a cryogenic 3-axis scanning stage was developed and the operation of the scanning stage was demonstrated in the final two experiments. The rst scanning experiment was conducted on a 49 site Kagome lattice, where a sapphire defect was used to locally perturb each lattice site. This perturbative scanning probe microscopy provided a means to measure the distribution of photon modes throughout the entire lattice. The second scanning experiment was performed on a single transmission line resonator where a transmon qubit was fabricated on a separate substrate, mounted to the tip of the scanning stage and coupled to the resonator. Here the coupling strength of the qubit to the resonator was mapped out demonstrating strong coupling over a wide scanning range, thus indicating the potential for a scanning qubit to be used as a local quantum probe.
We describe a superconducting-circuit lattice design for the implementation and simulation of dynamical lattice gauge theories. We illustrate our proposal by analyzing a one-dimensional U(1) quantum-link model, where superconducting qubits play the role of matter fields on the lattice sites and the gauge fields are represented by two coupled microwave resonators on each link between neighboring sites. A detailed analysis of a minimal experimental protocol for probing the physics related to string breaking effects shows that, despite the presence of decoherence in these systems, distinctive phenomena from condensed-matter and high-energy physics can be visualized with state-of-the-art technology in small superconducting-circuit arrays.