No Arabic abstract
Virtual photons can mediate interaction between atoms, resulting in an energy shift known as a collective Lamb shift. Observing the collective Lamb shift is challenging, since it can be obscured by radiative decay and direct atom-atom interactions. Here, we place two superconducting qubits in a transmission line terminated by a mirror, which suppresses decay. We measure a collective Lamb shift reaching 0.8% of the qubit transition frequency and exceeding the transition linewidth. We also show that the qubits can interact via the transmission line even if one of them does not decay into it.
Hybrid quantum systems consisting of an ensemble of two--level systems interacting with a single--mode electromagnetic field are important for the development of quantum information processors and other quantum devices. These systems are characterized by the set of energy level hybridizations, split by collective Lamb shifts, that occur when the ensemble and field mode interact coherently with high cooperativity. Computing the full set of Lamb shifts is generally intractable given the high dimensionality of many devices. In this work, we present a set of techniques that allow a compact description of the Lamb shift statistics across all collective angular momentum subspaces of the ensemble without using restrictive approximations on the state space. We use these techniques to both analyze the Lamb shift in all subspaces and excitation manifolds and to describe the average observed Lamb shift weighted over the degeneracies of all subspaces.
We study the vacuum radiative corrections to energy levels of a confined electron in quantum rings. The calculations are provided for the Lamb shift of energy levels in low-momentum region of virtual photons and for both one-dimensional and two-dimensional quantum rings. We show that contrary to the well known case of a hydrogen atom the value of the Lamb shift increases with the magnetic momentum quantum number m. We also investigate the dependence of the Lamb shift on magnetic flux piercing the ring and demonstrate a presence of magnetic-flux-dependent oscillations. For one-dimensional ring the value of the shift strongly depends on the radius of the ring. It is extremely small for semiconductor rings but can attain measurable quantities in natural organic ring-shape molecules, such as benzene, cycloalcanes and porphyrins.
We show that the physics underlying the dynamical Casimir effect may generate multipartite quantum correlations. To achieve it, we propose a circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) scenario involving superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs), cavities, and superconducting qubits, also called artificial atoms. Our results predict the generation of highly entangled states for two and three superconducting qubits in different geometric configurations with realistic parameters. This proposal paves the way for a scalable method of multipartite entanglement generation in cavity networks through dynamical Casimir physics.
Circuit quantum electrodynamics systems are typically built from resonators and two-level artificial atoms, but the use of multi-level artificial atoms instead can enable promising applications in quantum technology. Here we present an implementation of a Josephson junction circuit dedicated to operate as a V-shape artificial atom. Based on a concept of two internal degrees of freedom, the device consists of two transmon qubits coupled by an inductance. The Josephson nonlinearity introduces a strong diagonal coupling between the two degrees of freedom that finds applications in quantum non-demolition readout schemes, and in the realization of microwave cross-Kerr media based on superconducting circuits.
We obtain a general result for the Lamb shift of excited states of multi-level atoms in inhomogeneous electromagnetic structures and apply it to study atomic hydrogen in inverse-opal photonic crystals. We find that the photonic-crystal environment can lead to very large values of the Lamb shift, as compared to the case of vacuum. We also predict that the position-dependent Lamb shift should extend from a single level to a mini-band for an assemble of atoms with random distribution in space, similar to the velocity-dependent Doppler effect in atomic/molecular gases.