No Arabic abstract
A notorious problem in high-resolution biological electron microscopy is radiation damage to the specimen caused by probe electrons. Hence, acquisition of data with minimal number of electrons is of critical importance. Quantum approaches may represent the only way to improve the resolution in this context, but all proposed schemes to date demand delicate control of the electron beam in highly unconventional electron optics. Here we propose a scheme that involves a flux qubit based on a radio-frequency superconducting quantum interference device (rf-SQUID), inserted in essentially a conventional transmission electron microscope. The scheme significantly improves the prospect of realizing a quantum-enhanced electron microscope for radiation-sensitive specimens.
The major resolution-limiting factor in cryoelectron microscopy of unstained biological specimens is radiation damage by the very electrons that are used to probe the specimen structure. To address this problem, an electron microscopy scheme that employs quantum entanglement to enable phase measurement precision beyond the standard quantum limit has recently been proposed {[}Phys. Rev. A textbf{85}, 043810{]}. Here we identify and examine in detail measurement errors that will arise in the scheme. An emphasis is given to considerations concerning inelastic scattering events because in general schemes assisted with quantum entanglement are known to be highly vulnerable to lossy processes. We find that the amount of error due both to elastic and inelastic scattering processes are acceptable provided that the electron beam geometry is properly designed.
Electron-spin nitrogen-vacancy color centers in diamond are a natural candidate to act as a quantum memory for superconducting qubits because of their large collective coupling and long coherence times. We report here the first demonstration of strong coupling and coherent exchange of a single quantum of energy between a flux-qubit and an ensemble of nitrogen-vacancy color centers.
We report on electron spin resonance spectroscopy measurements using a superconducting flux qubit with a sensing volume of 6 fl. The qubit is read out using a frequency-tunable Josephson bifurcation amplifier, which leads to an inferred measurement sensitivity of about 20 spins in a 1 s measurement. This sensitivity represents an order of magnitude improvement when compared with flux-qubit schemes using a dc-SQUID switching readout. Furthermore, noise spectroscopy reveals that the sensitivity is limited by flicker ($1/f$) flux noise.
The textit{heavy-fluxonium} circuit is a promising building block for superconducting quantum processors due to its long relaxation and dephasing time at the half-flux frustration point. However, the suppressed charge matrix elements and low transition frequency have made it challenging to perform fast single-qubit gates using standard protocols. We report on new protocols for reset, fast coherent control, and readout, that allow high-quality operation of the qubit with a 14 MHz transition frequency, an order of magnitude lower in energy than the ambient thermal energy scale. We utilize higher levels of the fluxonium to initialize the qubit with $97$% fidelity, corresponding to cooling it to $190~mathrm{mu K}$. We realize high-fidelity control using a universal set of single-cycle flux gates, which are comprised of directly synthesizable fast pulses, while plasmon-assisted readout is used for measurements. On a qubit with $T_1, T_{2e}sim$~300~$mathrm{mu s}$, we realize single-qubit gates in $20-60$~ns with an average gate fidelity of $99.8%$ as characterized by randomized benchmarking.
A new method for detecting the magnetic resonance of electronic spins at low temperature is demonstrated. It consists in measuring the signal emitted by the spins with a superconducting qubit that acts as a single-microwave-photon detector, resulting in an enhanced sensitivity. We implement this new type of electron-spin resonance spectroscopy using a hybrid quantum circuit in which a transmon qubit is coupled to a spin ensemble consisting of NV centers in diamond. With this setup we measure the NV center absorption spectrum at 30mK at an excitation level of thicksim15,mu_{B} out of an ensemble of 10^{11} spins.