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Bulletin of the American Physical Society

Generating entanglement via measurement between two remote superconducting qubits

Nicolas Roch, M.E. Schwarzt, Felix Motzoi, Chris Macklin, Rajamani Vijay, Andrew Eddins, Alexander N. Korotkov, K. Birgitta Whaley, Mohan Sarovar, Irfan A. Siddiqi

Published Mar 5, 2014• 1 citation
OpenAlex

Abstract

Measurement has traditionally been viewed as a means to restore classical behavior to a quantum system: a coherent superposition, once observed, transforms into a single classical state. However, it is possible to design a measurement that instead projects into an entangled state, thereby purifying, rather than destroying, quantum correlations. We use continuous measurement to generate entanglement between two superconducting qubits that are separated by more than a meter of cable, demonstrating that quantum information can be transferred over the metallic wires that comprise a low-loss channel for microwave photon propagation. We further generate a faithful, time-resolved record of single quantum trajectories. Studying the statistics of these trajectories and of the ensemble of measurements provides insight into the dynamics of measurement-induced entanglement in an extended quantum network.

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Measurement has traditionally been viewed as a means to restore classical behavior to a quantum system: a coherent superposition, once observed, transforms into a single classical state. However, it is possible to design a measurement that instead projects into an entangled state, thereby purifying, rather than destroying, quantum correlations. We use continuous measurement to generate entanglement between two superconducting qubits that are separated by more than a meter of cable, demonstrating that quantum information can be transferred over the metallic wires that comprise a low-loss channel for microwave photon propagation. We further generate a faithful, time-resolved record of single quantum trajectories. Studying the statistics of these trajectories and of the ensemble of measurements provides insight into the dynamics of measurement-induced entanglement in an extended quantum network.
The creation of a quantum network requires the distribution of coherent information across macroscopic distances. We demonstrate the entanglement of two superconducting qubits, separated by more than a meter of coaxial cable, by designing a joint measurement that probabilistically projects onto an entangled state. By using a continuous measurement scheme, we are further able to observe single quantum trajectories of the joint two-qubit state, confirming the validity of the quantum Bayesian formalism for a cascaded system. Our results allow us to resolve the dynamics of continuous projection onto the entangled manifold, in quantitative agreement with theory.
We experimentally and theoretically investigate the quantum trajectories of jointly monitored transmon qubits embedded in spatially separated microwave cavities.Using nearly quantum-noise-limited superconducting amplifiers and an optimized setup to reduce signal loss between cavities, we can efficiently track measurement-induced entanglement generation as a continuous process for single realizations of the experiment.The quantum trajectories of transmon qubits naturally split into low and high entanglement classes.The distribution of concurrence is found at any given time, and we explore the dynamics of entanglement creation in the state space.The distribution exhibits a sharp cutoff in the high concurrence limit, defining a maximal concurrence boundary.The most-likely paths of the qubits' trajectories are also investigated, resulting in three probable paths, gradually projecting the system to two even subspaces and an odd subspace, conforming to a "half-parity" measurement.We also investigate the most-likely time for the individual trajectories to reach their most entangled state, and we find that there are two solutions for the local maximum, corresponding to the low and high entanglement routes.The theoretical predictions show excellent agreement with the experimental entangled-qubit trajectory data.
Superconducting quantum circuits provide a promising avenue for scalable quantum computation and simulation. Their chief advantage is that, unlike physical atoms or electrons, these ``artificial atoms'' can be designed with nearly-arbitrarily large coupling to one another and to their electromagnetic environment. This strong coupling allows for fast quantum bit (qubit) operations, and for efficient readout. However, strong coupling comes at a price: a qubit that is strongly coupled to its environment is also strongly susceptible to losses and dissipation, as coherent information leaks from the quantum system under study into inaccessible ``bath'' modes. Extensive work in the field is dedicated to engineering away these losses to the extent possible, and to using error correction to undo the effects of losses that are unavoidable.This dissertation explores an alternate approach to dissipation: we study avenues by which dissipation itself can be used to generate, rather than destroy, quantum resources. We do so specifically in the context of quantum entanglement, one of the most important and most counter-intuitive aspects of quantum mechanics. Entanglement generation and stabilization is critical to most non-trivial implementations of quantum computing and quantum simulation, as it is the property that distinguishes a multi-qubit quantum system from a string of classical bits. The ability to harness dissipation to generate, purify, and stabilize entanglement is therefore highly desirable.We begin with an overview of quantum dissipation and measurement, followed by an introduction to entanglement and to the superconducting quantum information architecture. We then discuss three sets of experiments that highlight and explore the powerful uses of dissipation in quantum systems. First, we use an entangling measurement to probabilistically generate entanglement between two qubits separated by more than one meter of ordinary cable. This represents the first achievement of remote entanglement in a superconducting qubit system, which will be a critical capability as quantum computers and simulators scale. We then use a nearly-quantum limited amplifier to unravel individual quantum trajectories of the system under that entangling measurement, performing the first systematic exploration of entangled trajectories in any physical implementation. We finally demonstrate deterministic entanglement by engineering a lossy quantum environment to efficiently generate and stabilize entangled states with both frequency and symmetry selectivity. These experiments provide evidence that explicitly building dissipation into an engineered quantum system can enable, rather than hinder, the study of fundamental quantum mechanics and complex many-body Hamiltonians.
A localized qubit entangled with a propagating quantum field is well suited to study nonlocal aspects of quantum mechanics and may also provide a channel to communicate between spatially separated nodes in a quantum network. Here, we report the on-demand generation and characterization of Bell-type entangled states between a superconducting qubit and propagating microwave fields composed of zero-, one-, and two-photon Fock states. Using low noise linear amplification and efficient data acquisition we extract all relevant correlations between the qubit and the photon states and demonstrate entanglement with high fidelity.
We discuss recent developments in measurement protocols that generate quantum entanglement between two remote qubits, focusing on the theory of joint continuous detection of their spontaneous emission. We consider a device geometry similar to that used in well-known Bell state measurements, which we analyze using a conceptually transparent model of stochastic quantum trajectories; we use this to review photodetection, the most straightforward case, and then generalize to the diffusive trajectories from homodyne and heterodyne detection as well. Such quadrature measurement schemes are a realistic two-qubit extension of existing circuit QED experiments, which obtain quantum trajectories by homodyning or heterodyning a superconducting qubit’s spontaneous emission, or an adaptation of existing optical measurement schemes to obtain jump trajectories from emitters. We mention key results, presented from within a single theoretical framework, and draw connections to concepts in the wider literature on entanglement generation by measurement (such as path information erasure and entanglement swapping). The photon which-path information acquisition, and therefore the two-qubit entanglement yield, is tunable under the homodyne detection scheme we discuss, at best generating equivalent average entanglement dynamics as in the comparable photodetection case. In addition to deriving this known equivalence, we extend past analyses in our characterization of the measurement dynamics: we include derivations of bounds on the fastest possible evolution toward a Bell state under joint homodyne measurement dynamics and characterize the maximal entanglement yield possible using inefficient (lossy) measurements.
We present a first-principles theoretical analysis of the entanglement of two superconducting qubits in spatially separated microwave cavities by a sequential (cascaded) probe of the two cavities with a coherent mode, that provides a full characterization of both the continuous measurement induced dynamics and the entanglement generation. We use the SLH formalism to derive the full quantum master equation for the coupled qubits and cavities system, within the rotating wave and dispersive approximations, and conditioned equations for the cavity fields. We then develop effective stochastic master equations for the dynamics of the qubit system in both a polaronic reference frame and a reduced representation within the laboratory frame. We compare simulations with and analyze tradeoffs between these two representations, including the onset of a non-Markovian regime for simulations in the reduced representation. We provide conditions for ensuring persistence of entanglement and show that using shaped pulses enables these conditions to be met at all times under general experimental conditions. The resulting entanglement is shown to be robust with respect to measurement imperfections and loss channels. We also study the effects of qubit driving and relaxation dynamics during a weak measurement, as a prelude to modeling measurement-based feedback control in this cascaded system.