Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

arXiv:2010.03376 · Physical Review X

Generating Two Continuous Entangled Microwave Beams Using a dc-Biased Josephson Junction

A. Peugeot, Gerbold C. Ménard, Simon Dambach, M. Westig, Björn Kubala, Yury Mukharsky, Carles Altimiras, P. Joyez, D. Vion, P. Roche, D. Esteve, P. Milman, Juha Leppäkangas, Göran Johansson, M. Hofheinz, Joachim Ankerhold, F. Portier

Published Jul 13, 2021• 42 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We show experimentally that a dc-biased Josephson junction in series with two microwave resonators emits entangled beams of microwaves leaking out of the resonators.In the absence of a stationary phase reference for characterizing the entanglement of the outgoing beams, we measure second-order coherence functions to prove the entanglement.The experimental results are found in quantitative agreement with theory, proving that the low-frequency noise of the dc bias is the main limitation for the coherence time of the entangled beams.This agreement allows us to evaluate the entropy of entanglement of the resonators, estimate the entanglement flux at their output, and to identify the improvements that could bring this device closer to a useful bright source of entangled microwaves for quantum-technological applications.

DOI
10.1103/physrevx.11.031008

Related papers

Emission of Nonclassical Radiation by Inelastic Cooper Pair Tunneling

M. Westig, Björn Kubala, Olivier Parlavecchio +11 more

We show that a properly dc-biased Josephson junction in series with two microwave resonators of different frequencies emits photon pairs in the resonators. By measuring auto- and intercorrelations of the power leaking out of the resonators, we demonstrate two-mode amplitude squeezing below the classical limit. This nonclassical microwave light emission is found to be in quantitative agreement with our theoretical predictions, up to an emission rate of 2 billion photon pairs per second.

arXiv:1703.05009•Physical Review Letters•Sep 26, 2017•57 citations

Quantum microwaves: Stabilizing squeezed light by phase locking

Lukas Danner, Florian Höhe, Ciprian Padurariu +2 more

Bright sources of quantum microwave light are an important building block for various quantum technological applications. Josephson junctions coupled to microwave cavities are a particularly versatile and simple source for microwaves with quantum characteristics, such as different types of squeezing. Due to the inherent nonlinearity of the system, a pure dc-voltage bias can lead to the emission of correlated pairs of photons into a stripline resonator. However, a drawback of this method is that it suffers from bias voltage noise, which disturbs the phase of the junction and consequently destroys the coherence of the photons, severely limiting its applications. Here we describe how adding a small ac reference signal either to the dc bias or directly into the cavity can stabilize the system and counteract the sensitivity to noise. We first consider the injection locking of a single-mode device before turning to the more technologically relevant locking of two-mode squeezed states, where phase locking preserves the entanglement between photons. Finally, we describe locking by directly injecting a microwave into the cavity, which breaks the symmetry of the squeezing ellipse. In all cases, locking can mitigate the effects of voltage noise and enable the use of squeezed states in quantum technological applications.

arXiv:2412.01499•Physical review. B./Physical review. B•May 30, 2025•4 citations

Antibunched Photons Emitted by a dc-Biased Josephson Junction

Chloé Rolland, A. Peugeot, Simon Dambach +11 more

We show experimentally that a dc biased Josephson junction in series with a high-enough-impedance microwave resonator emits antibunched photons. Our resonator is made of a simple microfabricated spiral coil that resonates at 4.4 GHz and reaches a 1.97 kΩ characteristic impedance. The second order correlation function of the power leaking out of the resonator drops down to 0.3 at zero delay, which demonstrates the antibunching of the photons emitted by the circuit at a rate of 6×10^{7} photons per second. Results are found in quantitative agreement with our theoretical predictions. This simple scheme could offer an efficient and bright single-photon source in the microwave domain.

arXiv:1810.06217•Physical Review Letters•May 10, 2019•61 citations

Josephson-photonics devices as stable sources and detectors for microwave photons

Lukas Danner

At its heart, a Josephson-photonics device combines macroscopic superconducting electronics and microscopic quantum optics. It consists of a dc-voltage biased Josephson junction that is connected in series to one or a few microwave cavities. Cooper pairs can tunnel incoherently across the junction by depositing their energy 2eVdc in the microwave cavities, creating photonic excitations in them. Many parameters, such as the eigenfrequencies ∝ (LC)^(−1/2) or zero-point fluctuations ∝ (L/C)^(1/4) of the microwave cavities, can be experimentally designed; other parameters, such as the strength of the Josephson nonlinearity and the dc voltage are easily modified in situ. In this way, Josephson-photonics devices constitute a versatile source of microwave photons with a wide variety of features extending from the classical to the deep quantum regime. To make them of use for quantum technological applications that rely on a well-defined phase of the microwave light, a crucial drawback must be overcome. The dc voltage does not provide a stable reference phase to Josephson-photonics devices, as it is subject to experimental noise, such that all phase information is lost. In this thesis, we develop the field of Josephson photonics in two directions: As first main result, we resolve the issue of phase instability in Josephson photonics. The phase can be stabilized either by injection locking to a small external signal with a stable and well-defined reference phase or by mutual synchronization to a second device. An alternative approach mitigates the issue for some use cases by optimizing an ansatz to reconstruct the undiffused stationary quantum state from experiments with phase diffusion. Secondly, we show how Josephson-photonics devices can be used for the challenging task of reliably detecting single itinerant microwave photons. The “Inelastic Cooper Pair Tunneling Photon Multiplier” exploits a resonance condition, where the energy provided by the dc voltage enables a multiplication process from one incoming to n outgoing photons. This process can be staged to reach a large number of outgoing photons. Here, we model itinerant Gaussian single-photon pulses of length T with Mølmer’s approach. Further, we define a detection scheme based on heterodyne quadrature measurement of the output signal. Most importantly, we show that realistic devices can achieve a detection efficiency of 84.5% with a small dark-count rate of 10^(−3)/T, promising to outperform competing schemes.

•Jan 1, 2025•0 citations

Photon-pair blockade in a Josephson-photonics circuit with two nondegenerate microwave resonators

Sheng-li Ma, Ji-kun Xie, Ya-long Ren +2 more

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.

arXiv:2203.15373•New Journal of Physics•Mar 25, 2022•10 citations

Generating entangled quantum microwaves in a Josephson-photonics device

Simon Dambach, Björn Kubala, Joachim Ankerhold

When connecting a voltage-biased Josephson junction in series to several microwave cavities, a Cooper-pair current across the junction gives rise to a continuous emission of strongly correlated photons into the cavity modes. Tuning the bias voltage to the resonance where a single Cooper pair provides the energy to create an additional photon in each of the cavities, we demonstrate the entangling nature of these creation processes by simple witnesses in terms of experimentally accessible observables. To characterize the entanglement properties of the such created quantum states of light to the fullest possible extent, we then proceed to more elaborate entanglement criteria based on the knowledge of the full density matrix and provide a detailed study of bi- and multipartite entanglement. In particular, we illustrate how due to the relatively simple design of these circuits changes of experimental parameters allow one to access a wide variety of entangled states differing, e.g., in the number of entangled parties or the dimension of state space. Such devices, besides their promising potential to act as a highly versatile source of entangled quantum microwaves, may thus represent an excellent natural testbed for classification and quantification schemes developed in quantum information theory.

arXiv:1609.08990•New Journal of Physics•Jan 31, 2017•24 citations
We show experimentally that a dc-biased Josephson junction in series with two microwave resonators emits entangled beams of microwaves leaking out of the resonators.In the absence of a stationary phase reference for characterizing the entanglement of the outgoing beams, we measure second-order coherence functions to prove the entanglement.The experimental results are found in quantitative agreement with theory, proving that the low-frequency noise of the dc bias is the main limitation for the coherence time of the entangled beams.This agreement allows us to evaluate the entropy of entanglement of the resonators, estimate the entanglement flux at their output, and to identify the improvements that could bring this device closer to a useful bright source of entangled microwaves for quantum-technological applications.
Bright sources of quantum microwave light are an important building block for various quantum technological applications. Josephson junctions coupled to microwave cavities are a particularly versatile and simple source for microwaves with quantum characteristics, such as different types of squeezing. Due to the inherent nonlinearity of the system, a pure dc-voltage bias can lead to the emission of correlated pairs of photons into a stripline resonator. However, a drawback of this method is that it suffers from bias voltage noise, which disturbs the phase of the junction and consequently destroys the coherence of the photons, severely limiting its applications. Here we describe how adding a small ac reference signal either to the dc bias or directly into the cavity can stabilize the system and counteract the sensitivity to noise. We first consider the injection locking of a single-mode device before turning to the more technologically relevant locking of two-mode squeezed states, where phase locking preserves the entanglement between photons. Finally, we describe locking by directly injecting a microwave into the cavity, which breaks the symmetry of the squeezing ellipse. In all cases, locking can mitigate the effects of voltage noise and enable the use of squeezed states in quantum technological applications.
We show experimentally that a dc biased Josephson junction in series with a high-enough-impedance microwave resonator emits antibunched photons. Our resonator is made of a simple microfabricated spiral coil that resonates at 4.4 GHz and reaches a 1.97 kΩ characteristic impedance. The second order correlation function of the power leaking out of the resonator drops down to 0.3 at zero delay, which demonstrates the antibunching of the photons emitted by the circuit at a rate of 6×10^{7} photons per second. Results are found in quantitative agreement with our theoretical predictions. This simple scheme could offer an efficient and bright single-photon source in the microwave domain.
At its heart, a Josephson-photonics device combines macroscopic superconducting electronics and microscopic quantum optics. It consists of a dc-voltage biased Josephson junction that is connected in series to one or a few microwave cavities. Cooper pairs can tunnel incoherently across the junction by depositing their energy 2eVdc in the microwave cavities, creating photonic excitations in them. Many parameters, such as the eigenfrequencies ∝ (LC)^(−1/2) or zero-point fluctuations ∝ (L/C)^(1/4) of the microwave cavities, can be experimentally designed; other parameters, such as the strength of the Josephson nonlinearity and the dc voltage are easily modified in situ. In this way, Josephson-photonics devices constitute a versatile source of microwave photons with a wide variety of features extending from the classical to the deep quantum regime. To make them of use for quantum technological applications that rely on a well-defined phase of the microwave light, a crucial drawback must be overcome. The dc voltage does not provide a stable reference phase to Josephson-photonics devices, as it is subject to experimental noise, such that all phase information is lost. In this thesis, we develop the field of Josephson photonics in two directions: As first main result, we resolve the issue of phase instability in Josephson photonics. The phase can be stabilized either by injection locking to a small external signal with a stable and well-defined reference phase or by mutual synchronization to a second device. An alternative approach mitigates the issue for some use cases by optimizing an ansatz to reconstruct the undiffused stationary quantum state from experiments with phase diffusion. Secondly, we show how Josephson-photonics devices can be used for the challenging task of reliably detecting single itinerant microwave photons. The “Inelastic Cooper Pair Tunneling Photon Multiplier” exploits a resonance condition, where the energy provided by the dc voltage enables a multiplication process from one incoming to n outgoing photons. This process can be staged to reach a large number of outgoing photons. Here, we model itinerant Gaussian single-photon pulses of length T with Mølmer’s approach. Further, we define a detection scheme based on heterodyne quadrature measurement of the output signal. Most importantly, we show that realistic devices can achieve a detection efficiency of 84.5% with a small dark-count rate of 10^(−3)/T, promising to outperform competing schemes.
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.
When connecting a voltage-biased Josephson junction in series to several microwave cavities, a Cooper-pair current across the junction gives rise to a continuous emission of strongly correlated photons into the cavity modes. Tuning the bias voltage to the resonance where a single Cooper pair provides the energy to create an additional photon in each of the cavities, we demonstrate the entangling nature of these creation processes by simple witnesses in terms of experimentally accessible observables. To characterize the entanglement properties of the such created quantum states of light to the fullest possible extent, we then proceed to more elaborate entanglement criteria based on the knowledge of the full density matrix and provide a detailed study of bi- and multipartite entanglement. In particular, we illustrate how due to the relatively simple design of these circuits changes of experimental parameters allow one to access a wide variety of entangled states differing, e.g., in the number of entangled parties or the dimension of state space. Such devices, besides their promising potential to act as a highly versatile source of entangled quantum microwaves, may thus represent an excellent natural testbed for classification and quantification schemes developed in quantum information theory.