No Arabic abstract
Binary-outcome measurements allow to determine whether a multi-level quantum system is in a certain state while preserving quantum coherence between all orthogonal states. In this paper, we explore different regimes of the dispersive readout of a three-level superconducting quantum system coupled to a microwave cavity in order to implement binary-outcome measurements. By designing identical cavity frequency shifts for the first and second excited states of the system, we realize strong projective binary-outcome measurements onto its ground state with a fidelity of $94.3%$. Complemented with standard microwave control and low-noise parametric amplification, this scheme enables the quantum non-demolition detection of leakage errors and can be used to create sets of compatible measurements to reveal the contextual nature of superconducting circuits.
Using different configurations of applied strong driving and weak probe fields, we find that only a single three-level superconducting quantum circuit (SQC) is enough to realize amplification, attenuation and frequency conversion of microwave fields. Such a three-level SQC has to possess $Delta$-type cyclic transitions. Different from the parametric amplification (attenuation) and frequency conversion in nonlinear optical media, the real energy levels of the three-level SQC are involved in the energy exchange when these processes are completed. We quantitatively discuss the effects of amplification (attenuation) and the frequency conversion for different types of driving fields. The optimal points are obtained for achieving the maximum amplification (attenuation) and conversion efficiency. Our study provides a new method to amplify (attenuate) microwave, realize frequency conversion, and also lay a foundation for generating single or entangled microwave photon states using a single three-level SQC.
In quantum mechanics, the process of measurement is a subtle interplay between extraction of information and disturbance of the state of the quantum system. A quantum non-demolition (QND) measurement minimizes this disturbance by using a particular system - detector interaction which preserves the eigenstates of a suitable operator of the quantum system. This leads to an ideal projective measurement. We present experiments in which we perform two consecutive measurements on a quantum two -level system, a superconducting flux qubit, by probing the hysteretic behaviour of a coupled nonlinear resonator. The large correlation between the results of the two measurements demonstrates the QND nature of the readout method. The fact that a QND measurement is possible for superconducting qubits strengthens the notion that these fabricated mesoscopic systems are to be regarded as fundamental quantum objects. Our results are also relevant for quantum information processing, where projective measurements are used for protocols like state preparation and error correction.
Quantum computers promise to solve certain problems exponentially faster than possible classically but are challenging to build because of their increased susceptibility to errors. Remarkably, however, it is possible to detect and correct errors without destroying coherence by using quantum error correcting codes [1]. The simplest of these are the three-qubit codes, which map a one-qubit state to an entangled three-qubit state and can correct any single phase-flip or bit-flip error of one of the three qubits, depending on the code used [2]. Here we demonstrate both codes in a superconducting circuit by encoding a quantum state as previously shown [3,4], inducing errors on all three qubits with some probability, and decoding the error syndrome by reversing the encoding process. This syndrome is then used as the input to a three-qubit gate which corrects the primary qubit if it was flipped. As the code can recover from a single error on any qubit, the fidelity of this process should decrease only quadratically with error probability. We implement the correcting three-qubit gate, known as a conditional-conditional NOT (CCNot) or Toffoli gate, using an interaction with the third excited state of a single qubit, in 63 ns. We find 85pm1% fidelity to the expected classical action of this gate and 78pm1% fidelity to the ideal quantum process matrix. Using it, we perform a single pass of both quantum bit- and phase-flip error correction with 76pm0.5% process fidelity and demonstrate the predicted first-order insensitivity to errors. Concatenating these two codes and performing them on a nine-qubit device would correct arbitrary single-qubit errors. When combined with recent advances in superconducting qubit coherence times [5,6], this may lead to scalable quantum technology.
Three-wave mixing in second-order nonlinear optical processes cannot occur in atomic systems due to the electric-dipole selection rules. In contrast, we demonstrate that second-order nonlinear processes can occur in a superconducting quantum circuit (i.e., a superconducting artificial atom) when the inversion symmetry of the potential energy is broken by simply changing the applied magnetic flux. In particular, we show that difference- and sum-frequencies (and second harmonics) can be generated in the microwave regime in a controllable manner by using a single three-level superconducting flux quantum circuit (SFQC). For our proposed parameters, the frequency tunability of this circuit can be achieved in the range of about 17 GHz for the sum-frequency generation, and around 42 GHz (or 26 GHz) for the difference-frequency generation. Our proposal provides a simple method to generate second-order nonlinear processes within current experimental parameters of SFQCs.
We adopt a three-level bosonic model to investigate the quantum phase transition in an ultracold atom-molecule conversion system which includes one atomic mode and two molecular modes. Through thoroughly exploring the properties of energy level structure, fidelity, and adiabatical geometric phase, we confirm that the system exists a second-order phase transition from an atommolecule mixture phase to a pure molecule phase. We give the explicit expression of the critical point and obtain two scaling laws to characterize this transition. In particular we find that both the critical exponents and the behaviors of ground-state geometric phase change obviously in contrast to a similar two-level model. Our analytical calculations show that the ground-state geometric phase jumps from zero to ?pi/3 at the critical point. This discontinuous behavior has been checked by numerical simulations and it can be used to identify the phase transition in the system.