No Arabic abstract
Since the birth of quantum optics, the measurement of quantum states of nonclassical light has been of tremendous importance for advancement in the field. To date, conventional detectors such as photomultipliers, avalanche photodiodes, and superconducting nanowires, all rely at their core on linear excitation of bound electrons with light, posing fundamental restrictions on the detection. In contrast, the interaction of free electrons with light in the context of quantum optics is highly nonlinear and offers exciting possibilities. The first experiments that promoted this direction appeared over the past decade as part of photon-induced nearfield electron microscopy (PINEM), wherein free electrons are capable of high-order multi-photon absorption and emission. Here we propose using free electrons for quantum-optical detection of the complete quantum state of light. We show how the precise control of the electron before and after its interaction with quantum light enables to extract the photon statistics and implement full quantum state tomography using PINEM. This technique can reach sub-attosecond time resolutions, measure temporal coherence of any degree (e.g., g(1), g(2)), and simultaneously detect large numbers of photons with each electron. Importantly, the interaction of the electron with light is non-destructive, thereby leaving the photonic state (modified by the interaction) intact, which is conceptually different from conventional detectors. By using a pulse of multiple electrons, we envision how PINEM quantum detectors could achieve a single-shot measurement of the complete state of quantum light, even for non-reproducible emission events. Altogether, our work paves the way to novel kinds of photodetectors that utilize the ultrafast duration, high nonlinearity, and non-destructive nature of electron-light interactions.
Various parameters of a trapped collection of cold and ultracold atoms can be determined non--destructively by measuring the phase shift of an off--resonant probe beam, caused by the state dependent index of refraction of the atoms. The dispersive light--atom interaction, however, gives rise to a differential light shift (AC Stark shift) between the atomic states which, for a nonuniform probe intensity distribution, causes an inhomogeneous dephasing between the atoms. In this paper, we investigate the effects of this inhomogeneous light shift in non--destructive measurement schemes. We interpret our experimental data on dispersively probed Rabi oscillations and Ramsey fringes in terms of a simple light shift model which is shown to describe the observed behavior well. Furthermore, we show that by using spin echo techniques, the inhomogeneous phase shift distribution between the two clock levels can be reversed.
Quantum error correction is a crucial step beyond the current noisy-intermediate-scale quantum device towards fault-tolerant quantum computing. However, most of the error corrections ever demonstrated rely on post-selection of events or post-correction of states, based on measurement results repeatedly recorded during circuit execution. On the other hand, real-time error correction is supposed to be performed through classical feedforward of the measurement results to data qubits. It provides unavoidable latency from conditional electronics that would limit the scalability of the next-generation quantum processors. Here we propose a new approach to real-time error correction that is free from measurement and realized by using multi-controlled gates based on higher-dimensional state space. Specifically, we provide a series of novel decompositions of a Toffoli gate by using the lowest three energy levels of a transmon that significantly reduce the number of two-qubit gates and discuss their essential features, such as extendability to an arbitrary number of control qubits, the necessity of exclusively controlled NOT gates, and usefulness of their incomplete variants. Combined with the recently demonstrated schemes of fast two-qubit gates and all-microwave qubit reset, it would substantially shorten the time required for error correction and resetting ancilla qubits compared to a measurement-based approach and provide an error correction rate of $gtrsim1$~MHz with high accuracy for three-qubit bit- and phase-flip errors.
The spin of an electron in a self-assembled InAs/GaAs quantum dot molecule is optically prepared and measured through the trion triplet states. A longitudinal magnetic field is used to tune two of the trion states into resonance, forming a superposition state through asymmetric spin exchange. As a result, spin-flip Raman transitions can be used for optical spin initialization, while separate trion states enable cycling transitions for non-destructive measurement. With two-laser transmission spectroscopy we demonstrate both operations simultaneously, something not previously accomplished in a single quantum dot.
With the rise of quantum technologies, it is necessary to have practical and preferably non-destructive methods to measure and read-out from such devices. A current line of research towards this has focussed on the use of ancilla systems which couple to the system under investigation, and through their interaction, enable properties of the primary system to be imprinted onto and inferred from the ancillae. We propose the use of continuous variable qumodes as ancillary probes, and show that the interaction Hamiltonian can be fully characterised and directly sampled from measurements of the qumode alone. We suggest how such probes may also be used to determine thermodynamical properties, including reconstruction of the partition function. We show that the method is robust to realistic experimental imperfections such as finite-sized measurement bins and squeezing, and discuss how such probes are already feasible with current experimental setups.
We consider the temporal correlations of the quantum state of a qubit subject to simultaneous continuous measurement of two non-commuting qubit observables. Such qubit state correlators are defined for an ensemble of qubit trajectories, which has the same fixed initial state and can also be optionally constrained by a fixed final state. We develop a stochastic path integral description for the continuous quantum measurement and use it to calculate the considered correlators. Exact analytic results are possible in the case of ideal measurements of equal strength and are also shown to agree with solutions obtained using the Fokker-Planck equation. For a more general case with decoherence effects and inefficiency, we use a diagrammatic approach to find the correlators perturbatively in the quantum efficiency. We also calculate the state correlators for the quantum trajectories which are extracted from readout signals measured in a transmon qubit experiment, by means of the quantum Bayesian state update. We find an excellent agreement between the correlators based on the experimental data and those obtained from our analytical and numerical results.