No Arabic abstract
We study effective light-matter interactions in a circuit QED system consisting of a single $LC$ resonator, which is coupled symmetrically to multiple superconducting qubits. Starting from a minimal circuit model, we demonstrate that in addition to the usual collective qubit-photon coupling the resulting Hamiltonian contains direct qubit-qubit interactions, which have a drastic effect on the ground and excited state properties of such circuits in the ultrastrong coupling regime. In contrast to a superradiant phase transition expected from the standard Dicke model, we find an opposite mechanism, which at very strong interactions completely decouples the photon mode and projects the qubits into a highly entangled ground state. These findings resolve previous controversies over the existence of superradiant phases in circuit QED, but they more generally show that the physics of two- or multi-atom cavity QED settings can differ significantly from what is commonly assumed.
The interaction between an atom and the electromagnetic field inside a cavity has played a crucial role in the historical development of our understanding of light-matter interaction and is a central part of various quantum technologies, such as lasers and many quantum computing architectures. The emergence of superconducting qubits has allowed the realization of strong and ultrastrong coupling between artificial atoms and cavities. If the coupling strength $g$ becomes as large as the atomic and cavity frequencies ($Delta$ and $omega_{rm o}$ respectively), the energy eigenstates including the ground state are predicted to be highly entangled. This qualitatively new regime can be called the deep strong-coupling regime, and there has been an ongoing debate over whether it is fundamentally possible to realize this regime in realistic physical systems. By inductively coupling a flux qubit and an LC oscillator via Josephson junctions, we have realized circuits with $g/omega_{rm o}$ ranging from 0.72 to 1.34 and $g/Deltagg 1$. Using spectroscopy measurements, we have observed unconventional transition spectra, with patterns resembling masquerade masks, that are characteristic of this new regime. Our results provide a basis for ground-state-based entangled-pair generation and open a new direction of research on strongly correlated light-matter states in circuit-quantum electrodynamics.
The controllability of current quantum technologies allows to implement spin-boson models where two-photon couplings are the dominating terms of light-matter interaction. In this case, when the coupling strength becomes comparable with the characteristic frequencies, a spectral collapse can take place, i.e. the discrete system spectrum can collapse into a continuous band. Here, we analyze the thermodynamic limit of the two-photon Dicke model, which describes the interaction of an ensemble of qubits with a single bosonic mode. We find that there exists a parameter regime where two-photon interactions induce a superradiant phase transition, before the spectral collapse occurs. Furthermore, we extend the mean-field analysis by considering second-order quantum fluctuations terms, in order to analyze the low-energy spectrum and compare the critical behavior with the one-photon case.
Light-matter interaction, and the understanding of the fundamental physics behind, is the scenario of emerging quantum technologies. Solid state devices allow the exploration of new regimes where ultrastrong coupling (USC) strengths are comparable to subsystem energies, and new exotic phenomena like quantum phase transitions and ground-state entanglement occur. While experiments so far provided only spectroscopic evidence of USC, we propose a new dynamical protocol for detecting virtual photon pairs in the dressed eigenstates. This is the fingerprint of the violated conservation of the number of excitations, which heralds the symmetry broken by USC. We show that in flux-based superconducting architectures this photon production channel can be coherenly amplified by Stimulated Raman Adiabatic Passage (STIRAP). This provides a unique tool for an unambiguous dynamical detection of USC in present day hardware. Implementing this protocol would provide a benchmark for control of the dynamics of USC architectures, in view of applications to quantum information and microwave quantum photonics.
We study a circuit QED setup where multiple superconducting qubits are ultrastrongly coupled to a single radio-frequency resonator. In this extreme parameter regime of cavity QED the dynamics of the electromagnetic mode is very slow compared to all other relevant timescales and can be described as an effective particle moving in an adiabatic energy landscape defined by the qubits. The focus of this work is placed on settings with two or multiple qubits, where different types of symmetry-breaking transitions in the ground- and excited-state potentials can occur. Specifically, we show how the change in the level structure and the wave packet dynamics associated with these transition points can be probed via conventional excitation spectra and Ramsey measurements performed at GHz frequencies. More generally, this analysis demonstrates that state-of-the-art circuit QED systems can be used to access a whole range of particle-like quantum mechanical phenomena beyond the usual paradigm of coupled qubits and oscillators.
We present an experimentally feasible scheme to implement holonomic quantum computation in the ultrastrong-coupling regime of light-matter interaction. The large anharmonicity and the Z2 symmetry of the quantum Rabi model allow us to build an effective three-level {Lambda}-structured artificial atom for quantum computation. The proposed physical implementation includes two gradiometric flux qubits and two microwave resonators where single-qubit gates are realized by a two-tone driving on one physical qubit, and a two-qubit gate is achieved with a time-dependent coupling between the field quadratures of both resonators. Our work paves the way for scalable holonomic quantum computation in ultrastrongly coupled systems.