Cavity resonators are promising resources for quantum technology, while native nonlinear interactions for cavities are typically too weak to provide the level of quantum control required to deliver complex targeted operations. Here we investigate a scheme to engineer a target Hamiltonian for photonic cavities using ancilla qubits. By off resonantly driving dispersively coupled ancilla qubits, we develop an optimized approach to engineering an arbitrary photon-number-dependent Hamiltonian for the cavities while minimizing the operation errors. The engineered Hamiltonian admits various applications including canceling unwanted cavity self-Kerr interactions, creating higher-order nonlinearities for quantum simulations, and designing quantum gates resilient to noise. Our scheme can be implemented with coupled microwave cavities and transmon qubits in superconducting circuit systems.
Cavity resonators are promising resources for quantum technology, while native nonlinear interactions for cavities are typically too weak to provide the level of quantum control required to deliver complex targeted operations. Here we investigate a scheme to engineer a target Hamiltonian for photonic cavities using ancilla qubits. By off resonantly driving dispersively coupled ancilla qubits, we develop an optimized approach to engineering an arbitrary photon-number-dependent Hamiltonian for the cavities while minimizing the operation errors. The engineered Hamiltonian admits various applications including canceling unwanted cavity self-Kerr interactions, creating higher-order nonlinearities for quantum simulations, and designing quantum gates resilient to noise. Our scheme can be implemented with coupled microwave cavities and transmon qubits in superconducting circuit systems.
The large available Hilbert space and high coherence of cavity resonators make these systems an interesting resource for storing encoded quantum bits. To perform a quantum gate on this encoded information, however, complex nonlinear operations must be applied to the many levels of the oscillator simultaneously. In this work, we introduce the selective number-dependent arbitrary phase (snap) gate, which imparts a different phase to each Fock-state component using an off-resonantly coupled qubit. We show that the snap gate allows control over the quantum phases by correcting the unwanted phase evolution due to the Kerr effect. Furthermore, by combining the snap gate with oscillator displacements, we create a one-photon Fock state with high fidelity. Using just these two controls, one can construct arbitrary unitary operations, offering a scalable route to performing logical manipulations on oscillator-encoded qubits.
In this thesis, we study two different physical systems, namely superconducting circuits and optomechanical cavities. \nIn the first part of the thesis, we study superconducting qubits and resonators and their potential to implement quantum information processing tasks. We propose a circuit quantum electrodynamics realization of a protocol to generate a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state for transmon qubits homogeneously coupled to a microwave cavity in the dispersive limit. We derive an effective Hamiltonian with pairwise qubit exchange interactions of the XY type that can be globally controlled. Starting from a separable initial state, these interactions allow to generate a multi-qubit GHZ state within a time that does not depend on the number of qubits. We discuss how to probe the non-local nature and the genuine multipartite entanglement of the generated state. Finally, we investigate the stability of the proposed scheme to inhomogeneities in the physical parameters and the weak anharmonicity of transmon qubits. \nIn the second part of the thesis, we study optomechanical systems in which the position of a mechanical resonator modulates the resonance frequency of an optical cavity. The resulting radiation-pressure interaction is intrinsically nonlinear and can be used to implement strong Kerr nonlinearities and an effective interaction between photons. We investigate the optical bistability of such a system. The steady-state mean-field equation of the optical mode is identical to the one for a Kerr medium, and thus we expect it to have the same characteristic behavior with a lower, a middle, and an upper branch. However, the presence of position fluctuations of the mechanical resonator leads to a new feature: the upper branch will become unstable at sufficiently strong driving in certain parameter regimes. We identify the appropriate parameter regime for the upper branch to be stable, and we confirm, by numerical investigation of the quantum steady state, that the mechanical mode indeed acts as a Kerr nonlinearity for the optical mode in the low-temperature limit. This equivalence of the optomechanical system and the Kerr medium will be important for future applications of cavity optomechanics in quantum nonlinear optics and quantum information science. \n
Superconducting circuits provide an architecture upon which cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) can be implemented at microwave frequencies in a highly tunable environment. Known as circuit QED, these systems can achieve larger nonlinearities, stronger coupling and greater controllability than can be achieved in cavity QED, all in a customisable, solid state device, making this technology an exciting test bed for both quantum optics and quantum information processing. These new parameter regimes open up new avenues for quantum technology, while also allowing older quantum optics results to finally be tested. In particular is is now possible to experimentally produce nonclassical states, such as squeezed and Schr\\"odinger cat states, relatively simply in these devices. Using open quantum systems methods, in this thesis we investigate four problems which involve the use of nonclassical states in circuit QED. First we investigate the effects of a Kerr nonlinearity on the ability to preserve transported squeezed states in a superconducting cavity, and whether this setup permits us to generate, and perform tomography, of a highly squeezed field using a qubit, with possible applications in the characterisation of sources of squeezed microwaves. Second, we present a novel scheme for the amplification of cat states using a coupled qubit and external microwave drives, inspired by the stimulated Raman adiabatic passage. This scheme differs from similar techniques in circuit QED in that it is deterministic and therefore compatible with a protocol for stabilising cat states without the need for complex dissipation engineering. Next we use solutions of Fokker-Planck equations to study the exact steady-state response of two nonlinear systems: a transmon qubit coupled to a readout resonator, where we find good agreement with experiments and see simultaneous bistability of the cavity and transmon; and a parametrically driven nonlinear resonator, where we compare the classical and quantum phases of the system and discuss applications in the generation of squeezed states and stabilisation of cat states. Finally, we investigate the use of two different types of superconducting qubits in a single experiment, seeing that this enables engineering of the self- and cross-Kerr effects in a line of cavities. This could provide a valuable means of entangling cavity states, in addition to a resource for quantum simulation.
The rich dynamics and large Hilbert space of quantum harmonic oscillators make them natural candidates for hardware-efficient and error-correctable quantum information processing. However, implementing direct entangling operations between oscillators remains an outstanding challenge. Existing strategies typically rely on parametrically activating interactions that populate the excited states of a nonlinear element, which introduces additional dissipation channels and potential leakage from the encoded manifold. Here, we engineer a Raman-assisted cross-Kerr interaction between microwave photons hosted in two superconducting cavities. Crucially, this dynamics does not excite the mediating nonlinear coupler, thereby suppressing coupler induced decoherence and leakage out of the bosonic code space. We use this direct nonlinear coupling to implement a controlled-phase gate within the single- and two-photon subspaces of two oscillators, deterministically generating entanglement between them. Finally, we use these engineered dynamics to implement a photon-number parity check on a storage cavity via purely bosonic interactions with an ancillary cavity, demonstrating an enhancement in the storage lifetime. Our work provides a promising pathway toward engineering robust operations that act entirely within a protected bosonic code space and realizing fault-tolerant quantum information processing with bosonic elements.
The engineering of Kerr interactions is of great interest for processing quantum information in multipartite quantum systems and for investigating many-body physics in a complex cavity-qubit network. We study how coupling multiple different types of superconducting qubits to the same cavity modes can be used to modify the self- and cross-Kerr effects acting on the cavities and demonstrate that this type of architecture could be of significant benefit for quantum technologies. Using both analytical perturbation theory results and numerical simulations, we first show that coupling two superconducting qubits with opposite anharmonicities to a single cavity enables the effective self-Kerr interaction to be diminished, while retaining the number splitting effect that enables control and measurement of the cavity field. We demonstrate that this reduction of the self-Kerr effect can maintain the fidelity of coherent states and generalised Schrödinger cat states for much longer than typical coherence times in realistic devices. Next, we find that the cross-Kerr interaction between two cavities can be modified by coupling them both to the same pair of qubit devices. When one of the qubits is tunable in frequency, the strength of entangling interactions between the cavities can be varied on demand, forming the basis for logic operations on the two modes. Finally, we discuss the feasibility of producing an array of cavities and qubits where intermediary and on-site qubits can tune the strength of self- and cross-Kerr interactions across the whole system. This architecture could provide a way to engineer interesting many-body Hamiltonians and be a useful platform for quantum simulation in circuit quantum electrodynamics.
We propose to use the interaction between a single qubit atom and a surrounding ensemble of three level atoms to control the phase of light reflected by an optical cavity. Our scheme employs an ensemble dark resonance that is perturbed by the qubit atom to yield a single-atom single photon gate. We show here that off-resonant excitation towards Rydberg states with strong dipolar interactions offers experimentally-viable regimes of operations with low errors (in the 10 −3 range) as required for fault-tolerant optical-photon, gate-based quantum computation. We also propose and analyze an implementation within microwave circuit-QED, where a strongly-coupled ancilla superconducting qubit can be used in the place of the atomic ensemble to provide high-fidelity coupling to microwave photons.