QDE is an emerging paradigm in which an ancillary quantum system is used to remove entropy from a primary quantum system of interest. As a means for entropy reduction, quantum dissipation engineering (QDE) is useful across the domains of quantum sensing, computing, communication, and networking. Whereas most existing approaches concern QDE over an infinite time horizon, this paper studies the use of engineered environments to prepare the primary system in a pure state within finite time. This corresponds to completely transferring the primary system's initial entropy to the engineered environment in finite time. Necessary and sufficient conditions for performing this task are derived. These conditions elucidate the potential of finite-time QDE using real-world quantum systems.
Dissipation engineering offers a powerful tool for quantum technologies. Recently, new superconducting devices have achieved an engineered two-photon dissipation rate exceeding all other relevant timescales. In particular, they have proven most useful in preventing transitions between the logical states $|\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}\ensuremath{\alpha}⟩$ of a cat qubit. Here, we present three key applications of strong two-photon dissipation for quantum measurement and control, beyond cat qubit stabilization. Firstly, we demonstrate its efficacy in overcoming limitations encountered in Wigner tomography at high photon numbers. Secondly, we showcase its potential for realizing universal gates on cat qubits, exploiting the coherent mapping between cat qubit states and superpositions of 0 and 1 photons. Finally, we harness the transient dynamics of a cat state under two-photon dissipation to prepare squeezed cat states with a squeezing factor exceeding $3.96\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.07$ dB.
Dissipation engineering is a powerful framework for quantum state preparation and autonomous error correction in few-qubit systems. In this work, we examine the scalability of this approach and give three criteria which any dissipative state stabilization protocol should satisfy to be truly scalable as the number of qubits grows. Besides the requirement that it can be constructed in a resource-efficient manner from simple-to-engineer building blocks, a scalable protocol must also exhibit favorable scaling of the stabilization time with the increase in system size. We present a family of protocols which employ fixed-depth qubit-qubit interactions alongside engineered linear dissipation to stabilize an
N-qubit W state. We find that a modular approach to dissipation engineering, with several overlapping few-qubit dissipators rather than a single
N-qubit dissipator, is essential for our protocol to be scalable. With this approach, as the number of qubits increases our protocol exhibits low-degree polynomial scaling of the stabilization time and linear growth of the number of control drives in the best case. While the proposed protocol is most easily accessible with current state-of-the-art circuit-QED architectures, the modular dissipation engineering approach presented here can be readily adapted to other platforms and for stabilization of other interesting quantum states.