The diverse applications of light-matter interactions in science and technology stem from the qualitatively distinct ways these interactions manifest. I will present a series of experimental work that employs the light field of high-Q superconducting cavities coupled to non-linear circuit elements to harness the rich dynamics of their interactions for quantum information processing. With these versatile bosonic cQED systems, we show the ability to create, manipulate, and characterise complex non-Gaussian resource states [1] and achieve loss protection for them through phase-space engineering [2]. Moreover, by incorporating frequency-tunablility in our devices, we can effectively probe the intersections of different light-matter interaction regimes on demand [3]. Our work shows that bosonic cQED systems, albeit small in scale, provide a powerful platform to explore quantum information science and applications.
The diverse applications of light-matter interactions in science and technology stem from the qualitatively distinct ways these interactions manifest. I will present a series of experimental work that employs the light field of high-Q superconducting cavities coupled to non-linear circuit elements to harness the rich dynamics of their interactions for quantum information processing. With these versatile bosonic cQED systems, we show the ability to create, manipulate, and characterise complex non-Gaussian resource states [1] and achieve loss protection for them through phase-space engineering [2]. Moreover, by incorporating frequency-tunablility in our devices, we can effectively probe the intersections of different light-matter interaction regimes on demand [3]. Our work shows that bosonic cQED systems, albeit small in scale, provide a powerful platform to explore quantum information science and applications.
One of the key elements in circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) is the superconducting microwave resonator, which can enable strong coupling to and between nanoscale quantum systems, and as a result has emerged as an essential tool for both quantum information and quantum sensing. In this thesis, I will discuss new applications of superconducting resonators in both of these fields, which illustrates how quantum information and quantum sensing can be strongly tied together. As the field of quantum information continues to grow, various platforms for realizing a quantum computer have been proposed. One attractive platform is to control and manipulate the spin of an electron to form spin qubits, which have demonstrated a long coherence time, weak coupling to the environment, and high fidelity single- and two-qubit gates. However, scaling beyond two qubits has proven challenging, as has incorporating long-range coupling, although both are crucial for making spin qubits a scalable quantum computing platform. The confinement of electromagnetic fields in superconducting resonators enables strong coupling to small systems, such as the single electrons of a spin qubit. In the first part of this thesis, I will describe how a singlet-triplet spin qubit coupled to a high-impedance superconducting resonator constitutes a promising architecture for mediating long-ranged interactions based on a longitudinal coupling between the resonator and qubit. I will discuss the technical developments needed to successfully implement this novel type of interaction in a hybrid spin qubit-resonator device. This type of interaction has several advantages over the more commonly studied transverse coupling scheme: it does not require careful tuning of the qubit frequency to match that of the resonator, which facilitates scaling to a large number of qubits, and also avoids the loss of coherence, which is inevitable in resonant coupling. This type of interaction therefore opens promising paths for generating high-fidelity long-ranged two-qubit coupling by employing superconducting microwave resonators. By adapting techniques used in quantum information, we have also developed a new technique in quantum sensing, where we employ superconducting resonators as a probe of quantum materials such as mesoscopic systems, two-dimensional materials, and heterostructures, which are otherwise challenging to experimentally access with conventional techniques. In the second part of my thesis, I will discuss how implementing cQED techniques from quantum information allows us to probe the symmetry of the order parameter in unconventional superconductors. Unconventional superconductors are not readily available, and we therefore study an engineered system that comprises of interfacing a ferromagnet and superconductor, in which unconventional pairing can be induced into the ferromagnet. This platform allows us to simultaneously excite spin waves, a collective excitation of spins, in the ferromagnet, which opens new directions for studying interactions between coherently coupled magnons (quanta of spin waves) and unconventional superconducting states. Finally, by applying the same technique to a two-dimensional (2D) superconductor, tungsten ditelluride, we leverage this platform in an attempt to study the order parameter of its intrinsic superconducting phase. The nature of the order parameter in this material remains an open question, as both topological and superconducting phases can exist, possibly simultaneously. This work thus demonstrates a unique use of superconducting resonators beyond quantum information applications.
Abstract The unique features of quantum theory offer a powerful new paradigm for information processing. Translating these mathematical abstractions into useful algorithms and applications requires quantum systems with significant complexity and sufficiently low error rates. Such quantum systems must be made from robust hardware that can coherently store, process, and extract the encoded information, as well as possess effective quantum error correction (QEC) protocols to detect and correct errors. Circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) provides a promising hardware platform for implementing robust quantum devices. In particular, bosonic encodings in cQED that use multi-photon states of superconducting cavities to encode information have shown success in realizing hardware-efficient QEC. Here, we review recent developments in the theory and implementation of QEC with bosonic codes and report the progress made toward realizing fault-tolerant quantum information processing with cQED devices.
The diverse applications of light-matter interactions in science and technology stem from the qualitatively distinct ways these interactions manifest, prompting the development of physical platforms that can interchange between regimes on demand. Bosonic cQED employs the light field of high-Q superconducting cavities coupled to nonlinear circuit elements, harnessing the rich dynamics of their interaction for quantum information processing. However, implementing fast switching of the interaction regime without deteriorating the cavity coherence is a significant challenge. We present an experiment that achieves this feat, combining nanosecond-scale frequency tunability of a transmon coupled to a cavity with lifetime of hundreds of microseconds. Our implementation affords a range of useful capabilities for quantum information processing; from fast creation of cavity Fock states using resonant interaction and interchanging tomography techniques at qualitatively distinct interaction regimes on the fly, to the suppression of unwanted cavity-transmon dynamics during idle evolution. By bringing flux tunability into the bosonic cQED toolkit, our work opens up the possibility to probe the full range of light-matter interaction dynamics within a single platform and provides valuable pathways towards robust and versatile quantum information processing.
In this talk I will review a number of contributions to the field of superconducting quantum circuits, also known as circuit-QED. I will cover both fundamental topics, such as the design of artificial atoms and photons, and concrete applications to the fields of Quantum Optics, Quantum Simulation and Quantum Information. The emphasis will be set on the new tools that this exciting field provides: ultrastrong light-matter interactions, a precise control of propagating photons, and the engineering of photon interactions. Article not available.
Universal control of bosonic degrees of freedom provides a hardware-efficient route for quantum information processing with high-dimensional systems. Bosonic circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED), which leverages auxillary transmons to coherently control long-lived superconducting cavities, is well suited to this goal. However, such systems are traditionally operated in the dispersive regime, where the nearly degenerate cavity transitions prohibit the direct addressability of individual excitation levels of the bosonic mode and increase gate complexity. Here, we achieve direct oscillator control by dynamically accessing the resonant Jaynes-Cummings (JC) interactions, implemented with a hardware that integrates on-chip broadband magnetic flux delivery with a bosonic memory housed in a 3D superconducting cavity with lifetime exceeding 0.5 ms. We demonstrate deterministic preparation of Fock states and their superpositions within 100s of nanoseconds by directly climbing the JC ladder, and realise efficient arbitrary rotations between any pair of Fock states. Our resonant control scheme provides an analytical method for manipulating the entire Hilbert space of the bosonic mode at rates fundamentally more favourable than traditional dispersive strategies. This on-demand access to JC interactions opens a promising path toward realising robust Fock-basis qudits and harnessing the rich dynamics of high-dimensional bosonic systems for quantum information processing.
Cat states, with their unique phase-space interference properties, are ideal candidates for understanding fundamental principles of quantum mechanics and performing key quantum information processing tasks. However, they are highly susceptible to photon loss, which inevitably diminishes their quantum non-Gaussian features. Here, we protect these non-Gaussian features against photon loss by compressing the phase-space distribution of a cat state. We achieve this compression with a deterministic technique based on the echo conditional displacement operation in a circuit QED device. We present a versatile technique for creating robust non-Gaussian continuous-variable resource states in a highly linear bosonic mode and manipulating their phase-space distribution to achieve enhanced resilience against photon loss. Compressed cat states offer an attractive avenue for obtaining new insights into quantum foundations and quantum metrology, and for developing inherently more protected bosonic codewords for quantum error correction.