The interaction of light and matter is often described by the exchange of single excitations. When the coupling strength is a significant fraction of the system frequencies, the number of excitations are no longer preserved and that simple picture breaks down. This regime is known as the ultrastrong coupling regime and is characterized by non-trivial light–matter eigenstates and by complex dynamics. In this work, we propose to use an array Josephson junctions to increase the impedance of the light mode enabling ultrastrong coupling to a transmon qubit. We show that the resulting dynamics can be generated and probed by taking advantage of the multi-mode structure of the junction array. This proposal relies on the frequency tunability of the transmon and, crucially, on the use of a low frequency mode of the array, which allows for non-adiabatic changes of the ground state.
A major current challenge in solid-state quantum computing is to scale qubit arrays to a larger number of qubits. This is hampered by the complexity of the control wiring for the large number of independently tunable interqubit couplings within these arrays. One approach to simplifying the problem is to use a qubit array with fixed Ising (ZZ) interactions. When simultaneously driving a specific subset of qubits in such a system, the dynamics are confined to a set of commuting
su(2) subalgebras. Within these
su(2)s we describe how to perform X-gates and $\frac{\ensuremath{\pi}}{2}\phantom{\rule{4pt}{0ex}}\text{ZZ}$ rotations robustly against either leakage, which is the main source of error in transmon qubits, or coupling fluctuations, which is the main source of infidelity in flux or semiconductor spin qubits. These gates together with virtual-
z gates form a universal set of gates for quantum computing. We construct this set of robust gates for two-edge, three-edge, and four-edge vertices, which compose all existing superconducting qubit and semiconductor spin qubit arrays.