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Bulletin of the American Physical Society

Quantum Optics with Superconducting Circuits: From Single Photons to Schrodinger Cats

Robert J. Schoelkopf

Published Jan 9, 2013• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

Over the last decade and a half, superconducting circuits have advanced to the point where we can generate and detect highly-entangled states, and perform universal quantum gates. Meanwhile, the coherence properties of these systems have improved more than 10,000-fold. I will describe recent experiments, such as the latest advance in coherence using a three-dimensional implementation of qubits interacting with microwave cavities, called “3D circuit QED.” The control and strong interactions possible in superconducting circuits make it possible to generate non-classical states of light, including large superpositions known as “Schrodinger cat” states. This field has many interesting prospects both for applications in quantum information processing, and fundamental investigations of the boundary between the macroscopic classical world and the microscopic world of the quantum.

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Over the last decade and a half, superconducting circuits have advanced to the point where we can generate and detect highly-entangled states, and perform universal quantum gates. Meanwhile, the coherence properties of these systems have improved more than 10,000-fold. I will describe recent experiments, such as the latest advance in coherence using a three-dimensional implementation of qubits interacting with microwave cavities, called “3D circuit QED.” The control and strong interactions possible in superconducting circuits make it possible to generate non-classical states of light, including large superpositions known as “Schrodinger cat” states. This field has many interesting prospects both for applications in quantum information processing, and fundamental investigations of the boundary between the macroscopic classical world and the microscopic world of the quantum.
A revolution is underway in the construction of ‘artificial atoms’ out of superconducting electrical circuits. ‘Circuit QED’ permits strong-coupling non-linear optics at the single-photon level and gives an architecture for novel quantum information processing. The dispersive coupling between a qubit and a microwave cavity can be orders of magnitude larger than the line widths of both qubit and cavity. This yields a new ‘quantum toolbox’ which permits arbitrary control of the entangled quantum state of the system. For example one can flip the state of the qubit conditioned on there being exactly n photons in the cavity or one can displace the cavity oscillation amplitude conditioned on the state of the qubit. Using these tools it is now possible to create large ‘Schrödinger cat’ states containing more than 100 photons. An introduction to circuit QED and a review of recent experimental results will be presented.
In the last decade, the field of Quantum Optics has been enriched with a completely new platform: superconducting quantum circuits, also known as circuit-QED. This platform builds on the original designs of superconducting qubits, that is few-level systems made of superconducting islands and Josephson junctions, but adds to it a new ingredient, microwave photons. In this talk I will review circuit-QED with a focus on two complementary lines of research: ultrastrong light-matter coupling and strongly correlated propagating photons. The first topic deals with novel designs of superconducting qubits, engineering their coupling to the microwave radiation field to reach Rabi frequencies that approach the qubit and photon frequencies. In this regime, known as ”ultrastrong coupling”, the rotating wave approximation from Quantum Optics is no longer valid, the vacuum may spontaneously polarize, producing photons that get bound to the qubit, and novel physics is expected to emerge. I will review recent experiments on this topic, together with various theoretical proposals to tame this ultrastrong coupling. The second topic revolves around the notion of ”propagating” photons in these circuits. Most experiments in circuit-QED so far adopted the typical configuration of artificial atoms (qubits) interacting with artificial cavities (LC resonators). This proved useful in order to reach the strong coupling regime, demonstrating Rabi oscillations and developing a variety of protocols for quantum information, tomograhy, entanglement, etc. However, recent experiments have shown that it is possible to also work with propagating photons, replacing the LC resonators with open transmission lines, and studying the scattering properties of those artificial atoms. In this context we have worked on developing new technology to detect and control these photons, engineering single-photon detectors, quantum metamaterials and photonic crystals, or even new nonlinear media based on coupled cavities.
The founders of quantum physics used to analyse thought experiments, to discuss state superposition, complementarity and entanglement. They imagined manipulating single particles, such as electrons, atoms or photons; they would be surprised to see that experiments with isolated atoms, molecules or photons are now carried on in many laboratories throughout the world. In our Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics (CQED) studies, we stabilize and count photon number states in the cavity. We also prepare and reconstruct photonic superposition states suspended between different 'classical realities', generating a laboratory version of Schrodinger famous 'Cat', which he had imagined to be simultaneously dead and alive. We have also investigated the decoherence process, which explains the transition between the quantum and the classical worlds. CQED physics has recently been extended to artificial 'atoms' made from superconductors, in a new domain of mesoscopic physics called Circuit QED. This development opens the way to applications in quantum information science.
The last two decades have seen tremendous advances in our ability to generate and manipulate quantum coherence in mesoscopic superconducting circuits. These advances have opened up the study of quantum optics of microwave photons in superconducting circuits as well as providing important hardware for the manipulation of quantum information. Focusing primarily on charge-based qubits, we provide a brief overview of these developments and discuss the present state of the art. We also survey the remarkable progress that has been made in realizing circuit quantum electrodynamics (QED) in which superconducting artificial atoms are strongly coupled to individual microwave photons.
Superconducting (SC) circuits can behave like atoms making transitions between a few energy levels. Such circuits can test quantum mechanics at macroscopic scales and be used to conduct atomic-physics experiments on a silicon chip. This talk overviews a few of our theoretical studies on SC circuits and quantum information processing (QIP) including: SC qubits for single photon generation and for lasing; controllable couplings among qubits; how to increase the coherence time of qubits using a capacitor in parallel to one of the qubit junctions; hybrid circuits involving both charge and flux qubits; testing Bell’s inequality in SC circuits; generation of GHZ states; quantum tomography in SC circuits; preparation of macroscopic quantum superposition states of a cavity field via coupling to a SC qubit; generation of nonclassical photon states using a SC qubit in a microcavity; scalable quantum computing with SC qubits; and information processing with SC qubits in a microwave field. Controllable couplings between qubits can be achieved either directly or indirectly. This can be done with and without coupler circuits, and with and without data-buses like EM fields in cavities (e.g., we will describe both the variable-frequency magnetic flux approach and also a generalized double-resonance approach that we introduced). It is also possible to “turn a quantum bug into a feature” by using microscopic defects as qubits, and the macroscopic junction as a controller of it. We have also studied ways to implement radically different approaches to QIP by using “cluster states” in SC circuits.
Circuit quantum electrodynamics ('circuit QED') describes the quantum mechanics and quantum field theory of superconducting electrical circuits operating in the microwave regime near absolute zero temperature. It is the analog of cavity QED in quantum optics with the role of the atoms being played by superconducting qubits. The present lecture notes focus primarily on novel quantum states that can be produced and measured using the strong coupling between an artificial atom and one or more cavities. Of particular importance are Schrodinger cat states of photons. Despite long being considered exemplars of frail quantum superpositions that quickly decohere, such states have recently been used as the basis for quantum error correction codes which have reached the long-sought goal of enhancing the lifetime of quantum information through active quantum error correction.