Decoherence in macroscopic quantum systems arises mainly from interactions with the environmental bath, offering key insights into the quantum-classical boundary. In this paper, we study the acoustic-environment-induced effects in a circuit quantum electrodynamics system, where an LC oscillator is optomechanically coupled to a long mechanical strip and capacitively coupled to a superconducting qubit. The mechanical strip functions as an acoustic environment, comprising a continuum of bath modes. The qubit population, serving as a probe of acoustic-environment-induced dephasing (AEID), exhibits collapse and revival dynamics in its Rabi oscillations. The AEID effect is extracted using a Ramsey-like interference scheme, manifesting as a dynamical decay in amplitude and a modification in the oscillation frequency. Our scheme opens avenues for studying the mechanisms of decoherence introduced by acoustic environments and to explore the optomechanically induced nonlinearity by collective acoustic bath modes.
Decoherence in macroscopic quantum systems arises mainly from interactions with the environmental bath, offering key insights into the quantum-classical boundary. In this paper, we study the acoustic-environment-induced effects in a circuit quantum electrodynamics system, where an LC oscillator is optomechanically coupled to a long mechanical strip and capacitively coupled to a superconducting qubit. The mechanical strip functions as an acoustic environment, comprising a continuum of bath modes. The qubit population, serving as a probe of acoustic-environment-induced dephasing (AEID), exhibits collapse and revival dynamics in its Rabi oscillations. The AEID effect is extracted using a Ramsey-like interference scheme, manifesting as a dynamical decay in amplitude and a modification in the oscillation frequency. Our scheme opens avenues for studying the mechanisms of decoherence introduced by acoustic environments and to explore the optomechanically induced nonlinearity by collective acoustic bath modes.
We analyze the strong-coupling dynamics of a driven harmonic oscillator whose energy is modulated by a continuum of other bosonic modes. This type of system-bath interaction appears, for example, in optomechanical or equivalent circuit QED setups, where the frequency of a confined photonic mode depends linearly on a fluctuating boundary. Compared to the canonical spin-boson model, where coupling to bath modes only leads to decoherence, the role of the environment in such systems is more complex, since it also provides the only source of nonlinearity. We show that even for an unstructured bath, these environment-induced nonlinearities can dominate over decoherence processes resulting in Rabi oscillations and the formation of highly non-classical states. These findings provide important insights into the non-Markovian dynamics of higher-dimensional open quantum systems and for realizing few-photon optical nonlinearities through strong interactions with a bath.
We present exact solutions for the quantum time evolution of two spatially separated, local inductor-capacitor (LC) oscillators that are coupled optomechanically to a long elastic strip that functions as a quantum thermal acoustic field environment. We show that the optomechanical coupling to the acoustic environment gives rise to causal entanglement dynamics between the two LC oscillators in the absence of resonant photon exchange between them, and that significant entanglement develops regardless of the environment temperature. Such a process establishes that distributed entanglement may be generated between superconducting qubits via a connected phonon bus bar, without the need for resonant phonon release and capture.
We consider an optomechanical system comprising a single cavity mode and a dense spectrum of acoustic modes and solve for the quantum dynamics of initial cavity mode Fock (i.e., photon number) superposition states and thermal acoustic states. The optomechanical interaction results in dephasing without damping and bears some analogy to gravitational decoherence. For a cavity mode locally coupled to a one-dimensional elastic string-like environment or two-dimensional elastic membrane-like environment, we find that the dephasing dynamics depends respectively on the string length and membrane area---a consequence of an infrared divergence in the limit of an infinite-sized string or membrane. On the other hand, for a cavity mode locally coupled to a three-dimensional bulk elastic solid, the dephasing dynamics is independent of the solid volume (i.e., is infrared finite), but dependent on the local geometry of the coupled cavity---a consequence of an ultraviolet divergence in the limit of a ``pointlike'' coupled cavity. We consider as possible respective realizations for the cavity-coupled one- and two-dimensional acoustic environments an LC oscillator capacitively coupled to a partially metalized strip and a cavity light mode interacting via light pressure with a membrane.
We study decoherence effects in qubits coupled to environments that exhibit resonant frequencies in their spectral function. We model the coupling of the qubit to its environment via the Caldeira-Leggett formulation of quantum dissipation/coherence, and study the simplest example of decoherence effects in circuits with resonances such as a dc superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) phase qubit in the presence of an isolation circuit. Using the dc SQUID phase qubit as an example, we obtain two quite general results. First, when the frequency of the qubit is at least two times larger than the resonance frequency of the environmental spectral density (the isolation circuit in the case of a dc SQUID phase qubit), we find that the decoherence time of the qubit is a few orders of magnitude larger than that of the typical Ohmic regime, where the frequency of the qubit is much smaller than the resonance frequency of the spectral density. Second, we show that, when the qubit frequency is nearly the same as the resonant frequency of the environmental spectral density, an oscillatory non-Markovian decay emerges, as the qubit and its environment self-generate Rabi oscillations of characteristic time scales shorter than the decoherence time.
Superconducting resonators coupled to semiconductor quantum dots provide a powerful platform to investigate light-matter interaction and decoherence mechanisms in solid-state quantum systems. Here we study a hybrid circuit quantum electrodynamics architecture consisting of a GaAs double-quantum-dot charge qubit capacitively coupled to a high-impedance, frequency-tunable SQUID-array resonator. By tuning the qubit transition frequency over the range ωq/2π∼3-6 GHz, we perform frequency-resolved decoherence spectroscopy of the charge qubit across a broad energy window. Time-resolved measurements enable us to disentangle relaxation and pure dephasing processes and to identify distinct decoherence regimes as a function of qubit frequency. We find that at lower frequencies (≤4.5 GHz) dephasing dominates the qubit linewidth, whereas at higher frequencies energy relaxation becomes the leading contribution. The measured frequency dependence of the relaxation rate exhibits a cubic scaling, consistent with charge-qubit decay dominated by coupling to a piezoelectric phonon bath and providing frequency-resolved access to the corresponding phonon-induced spectral density. Our results show that hybrid semiconductor--superconducting circuits can serve as sensitive spectroscopic tools to probe microscopic decoherence mechanisms relevant for a wide range of hybrid quantum devices.
Circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED), exemplified by a coupled system of a superconducting qubit and a microwave cavity, is a powerful framework for the quantum control and measurement of macroscopic quantum states in solid-state circuits. Quantum circuits based on superconducting qubits have emerged as one of the leading platforms in the pursuit of fault-tolerant quantum computing. Despite significant progress in extending qubit lifetimes, refining experimental protocols, and scaling up quantum processors, errors arising from the control and measurement of superconducting qubits continue to hinder the realization of a universal quantum computer. To investigate the error mechanisms for state-of-the-art qubits, we realize long-lived superconducting transmon qubits that exhibit fluctuating lifetimes, with an average of 0.2 ms and a maximum exceeding 0.4 ms. We then investigate their dominant error mechanism. By introducing novel time-resolved error measurements that are synchronized with the operation of the pulse tube cooler in a dilution refrigerator, we find that mechanical vibrations from the pulse tube induce nonequilibrium dynamics in highly coherent qubits, leading to their correlated bit-flip errors. Our findings not only deepen our understanding of qubit error mechanisms but also provide valuable insights into potential error-mitigation strategies for achieving fault tolerance by decoupling superconducting qubits from their mechanical environments. We also present a novel scheme for operating a cQED system in a regime where the cavity is largely displaced. We find that a qubit drive at the bare cavity frequency can effectively displace the cavity field while minimizing the cavity-drive-induced dephasing and the ac Stark shift. Furthermore, we demonstrate that standard cQED protocols, such as qubit control, readout, and cavity single-photon generation, remain compatible with largely displaced cavity fields, even beyond the critical photon number. These findings open new pathways for exploring cQED dynamics in large-photon-number regimes, including the study of nonlinear phenomena in microwave cavities, the saturation of two-level system baths for extending the coherence of microwave quantum states, and the acceleration of the dispersive readout. Finally, mechanical resonators have emerged as integral components in quantum computing for storing and transducing quantum information. Low-frequency mechanical resonators, with extremely low energy dissipation rates, are particularly interesting for extending the lifetimes of stored quantum information. However, integrating low-frequency mechanical resonators with qubits is challenging because their small energy gaps make coherent energy exchange and ground-state preparation difficult. In this thesis, we report the first steps towards the characterization of a hybrid quantum device, consisting of a Transmon qubit and a circuit optomechanical system, both coupled to a 3D microwave cavity.