No Arabic abstract
Quantum optical photodetection has occupied a central role in understanding radiation-matter interactions. It has also contributed to the development of atomic physics and quantum optics, including applications to metrology, spectroscopy, and quantum information processing. The quantum microwave regime, originally explored using cavities and atoms, is seeing a novel boost with the generation of nonclassical propagating fields in circuit quantum electrodynamics (QED). This promising field, involving potential developments in quantum information with microwave photons, suffers from the absence of photodetectors. Here, we design a metamaterial composed of discrete superconducting elements that implements a high-efficiency microwave photon detector. Our design consists of a microwave guide coupled to an array of metastable quantum circuits, whose internal states are irreversibly changed due to the absorption of photons. This proposal can be widely applied to different physical systems and can be generalized to implement a microwave photon counter.
The driven-damped Jaynes-Cummings model in the regime of strong coupling is found to exhibit a coexistence between the quantum photon blockaded state and a quasi-coherent bright state. We characterize the slow time scales and the basin of attraction of these metastable states using full quantum simulations. This form of bistability can be useful for implementing a qubit readout scheme that does not require additional circuit elements. We propose a coherent control sequence that makes use of a simple linear chirp of drive amplitude and frequency as well as qubit frequency. By optimizing the parameters of the system and the control pulse we demonstrate theoretically very high readout fidelities (>98%) and high contrast, with experimentally realistic parameters for qubits implemented in the circuit QED architecture.
We analyze a two qubit parity measurement based on dispersive read-out in circuit quantum electrodynamics. The back-action on the qubits has two qualitatively different contributions. One is an unavoidable dephasing in one of the parity subspaces, arising during the transient time of switching on the measurement. The other part is a stochastic rotation of the phase in the same subspace, which persists during the whole measurement. The latter can be determined from the full measurement record, using the method of state estimation. Our main result is that the outcome of this phase determination process is {em independent} of the initial state in the state estimation procedure. The procedure can thus be used in a measurement situation, where the initial state is unknown. We discuss how this feed-back method can be used to achieve a high fidelity parity measurement for realistic values of the cavity-qubit coupling strength. Finally, we discuss the robustness of the feed-back procedure towards errors in the measurement record.
We present an indirect two-qubit parity meter in planar circuit quantum electrodynamics, realized by discrete interaction with an ancilla and a subsequent projective ancilla measurement with a dedicated, dispersively coupled resonator. Quantum process tomography and successful entanglement by measurement demonstrate that the meter is intrinsically quantum non-demolition. Separate interaction and measurement steps allow commencing subsequent data qubit operations in parallel with ancilla measurement, offering time savings over continuous schemes.
Previous studies of photon-assisted tunneling through normal-metal-insulator-superconductor junctions have exhibited potential for providing a convenient tool to control the dissipation of quantum-electric circuits in-situ. However, the current literature on such a quantum-circuit refrigerator (QCR) does not present a detailed description for the charge dynamics of the tunneling processes or the phase coherence of the open quantum system. Here we derive a master equation describing both quantum-electric and charge degrees of freedom, and discover that typical experimental parameters of low temperature and yet lower charging energy yield a separation of time scales for the charge and quantum dynamics. Consequently, the minor effect of the different charge states can be taken into account by averaging over the charge distribution. We also consider applying an ac voltage to the tunnel junction, which enables control of the decay rate of a superconducting qubit over four orders of magnitude by changing the drive amplitude; we find an order-of-magnitude drop in the qubit excitation in 40 ns and a residual reset infidelity below $10^{-4}$. Furthermore, for the normal island we consider the case of charging energy and single-particle level spacing large compared to the superconducting gap, i.e., a quantum dot. Although the decay rates arising from such a dot QCR appear low for use in qubit reset, the device can provide effective negative damping (gain) to the coupled microwave resonator. The Fano factor of such a millikelvin microwave source may be smaller than unity, with the latter value being reached close to the maximum attainable power.
Thorough control of quantum measurement is key to the development of quantum information technologies. Many measurements are destructive, removing more information from the system than they obtain. Quantum non-demolition (QND) measurements allow repeated measurements that give the same eigenvalue. They could be used for several quantum information processing tasks such as error correction, preparation by measurement, and one-way quantum computing. Achieving QND measurements of photons is especially challenging because the detector must be completely transparent to the photons while still acquiring information about them. Recent progress in manipulating microwave photons in superconducting circuits has increased demand for a QND detector which operates in the gigahertz frequency range. Here we demonstrate a QND detection scheme which measures the number of photons inside a high quality-factor microwave cavity on a chip. This scheme maps a photon number onto a qubit state in a single-shot via qubit-photon logic gates. We verify the operation of the device by analyzing the average correlations of repeated measurements, and show that it is 90% QND. It differs from previously reported detectors because its sensitivity is strongly selective to chosen photon number states. This scheme could be used to monitor the state of a photon-based memory in a quantum computer.