No Arabic abstract
We study a hybrid quantum system consisting of spin ensembles and superconducting flux qubits, where each spin ensemble is realized using the nitrogen-vacancy centers in a diamond crystal and the nearest-neighbor spin ensembles are effectively coupled via a flux qubit.We show that the coupling strengths between flux qubits and spin ensembles can reach the strong and even ultrastrong coupling regimes by either engineering the hybrid structure in advance or tuning the excitation frequencies of spin ensembles via external magnetic fields. When extending the hybrid structure to an array with equal coupling strengths, we find that in the strong-coupling regime, the hybrid array is reduced to a tight-binding model of a one-dimensional bosonic lattice. In the ultrastrong-coupling regime, it exhibits quasiparticle excitations separated from the ground state by an energy gap. Moreover, these quasiparticle excitations and the ground state are stable under a certain condition that is tunable via the external magnetic field. This may provide an experimentally accessible method to probe the instability of the system.
Quantum computing hardware has received world-wide attention and made considerable progress recently. YIG thin film have spin wave (magnon) modes with low dissipation and reliable control for quantum information processing. However, the coherent coupling between a quantum device and YIG thin film has yet been demonstrated. Here, we propose a scheme to achieve strong coupling between superconducting flux qubits and magnon modes in YIG thin film. Unlike the direct $sqrt{N}$ enhancement factor in coupling to the Kittel mode or other spin ensembles, with N the total number of spins, an additional spatial dependent phase factor needs to be considered when the qubits are magnetically coupled with the magnon modes of finite wavelength. To avoid undesirable cancelation of coupling caused by the symmetrical boundary condition, a CoFeB thin layer is added to one side of the YIG thin film to break the symmetry. Our numerical simulation demonstrates avoided crossing and coherent transfer of quantum information between the flux qubits and the standing spin waves in YIG thin films. We show that the YIG thin film can be used as a tunable switch between two flux qubits, which have modified shape with small direct inductive coupling between them. Our results manifest that it is possible to couple flux qubits while suppressing undesirable cross-talk.
We have demonstrated strong antiferromagnetic coupling between two three-junction flux qubits based on a shared Josephson junction, and therefore not limited by the small inductances of the qubit loops. The coupling sign and magnitude were measured by coupling the system to a high-quality superconducting tank circuit. Design modifications allowing to continuously tune the coupling strength and/or make the coupling ferromagnetic are discussed.
In this work we propose a way to unveil the type of environmental noise in strongly driven superconducting flux qubits through the analysis of the Landau-Zener-Stuckelberg (LZS) interferometry. We study both the two-level and the multilevel dynamics of the flux qubit driven by a dc+ac magnetic field. We found that the LZS interference patterns exhibit well defined multiphoton resonances whose shape strongly depend on the time scale and the type of coupling to a quantum bath. For the case of transverse system-bath coupling, the n-photon resonances are narrow and nearly symmetric with respect to the dc magnetic field for almost all time scales, whilst in the case of longitudinal coupling they exhibit a change from a wide symmetric to an antisymmetric shape for times of the order of the relaxation time. We find this dynamic behavior relevant for the interpretation of several LZS interferometry experiments in which the stationary regime is not completely reached.
Quantum annealing (QA) is a heuristic algorithm for finding low-energy configurations of a system, with applications in optimization, machine learning, and quantum simulation. Up to now, all implementations of QA have been limited to qubits coupled via a single degree of freedom. This gives rise to a stoquastic Hamiltonian that has no sign problem in quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulations. In this paper, we report implementation and measurements of two superconducting flux qubits coupled via two canonically conjugate degrees of freedom (charge and flux) to achieve a nonstoquastic Hamiltonian. Such coupling can enhance performance of QA processors, extend the range of quantum simulations. We perform microwave spectroscopy to extract circuit parameters and show that the charge coupling manifests itself as a YY interaction in the computational basis. We observe destructive interference in quantum coherent oscillations between the computational basis states of the two-qubit system. Finally, we show that the extracted Hamiltonian is nonstoquastic over a wide range of parameters.
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.