No Arabic abstract
Superconducting circuit testing and materials loss characterization requires robust and reliable methods for the extraction of internal and coupling quality factors of microwave resonators. A common method, imposed by limitations on the device design or experimental configuration, is the single-port reflection geometry, i.e. reflection-mode. However, impedance mismatches in cryogenic systems must be accounted for through calibration of the measurement chain while it is at low temperatures. In this paper, we demonstrate a data-based, single-port calibration using commercial microwave standards and a vector network analyzer (VNA) with samples at millikelvin temperature in a dilution refrigerator, making this method useful for measurements of quantum phenomena. Finally, we cross reference our data-based, single-port calibration and reflection measurement with over-coupled 2D- and 3D-resonators against well established two-port techniques corroborating the validity of our method.
The characteristic frequencies of a system provide important information on the phenomena that govern its physical properties. In this framework, there has recently been renewed interest in cryogenic microwave characterization for condensed matter systems since it allows to probe energy scales of the order of a few $mu$eV. However, broadband measurements of the absolute value of a sample response in this frequency range are extremely sensitive to its environment and require a careful calibration. In this paper, we present an textit{in situ} calibration method for cryogenic broadband microwave reflectometry experiments that is both simple to implement and through which the effect of the sample electromagnetic environment can be minimized. The calibration references are here provided by the sample itself, at three reference temperatures where its impedance is assumed or measured, and not by external standards as is usual. We compare the frequency-dependent complex impedance (0.1--2 GHz) of an a-Nb$_{15}$Si$_{85}$ superconducting thin film obtained through this Sample-Based Calibration (SBC) and through an Open-Short-Load Standard Calibration (SC) when working at very low temperature (0.02--4 K) and show that the SBC allows us to obtain the absolute response of the sample. This method brings the calibration planes as close as possible to the sample, so that the environment electrodynamic response does not affect the measurement, provided it is temperature independent. This results in a heightened sensitivity, for a given experimental set--up.
We propose a method for detecting the presence of a single spin in a crystal by coupling it to a high-quality factor superconducting planar resonator. By confining the microwave field in a constriction of nanometric dimensions, the coupling constant can be as high as $5-10$,kHz. This coupling affects the amplitude of the field emitted by the resonator, and the integrated homodyne signal allows detection of a single spin with unit signal-to-noise ratio within few milliseconds. We further show that a stochastic master equation approach and a Bayesian analysis of the full time dependent homodyne signal improves this figure by $sim 30%$ for typical parameters.
It has been proposed and demonstrated that path-entangled Fock states (PEFSs) are robust against photon loss over NOON states [S. D. Huver emph{et al.}, Phys. Rev. A textbf{78}, 063828 (2008)]. However, the demonstration was based on a measurement scheme which was yet to be implemented in experiments. In this work, we quantitatively illustrate the advantage of PEFSs over NOON states in the presence of photon losses by analytically calculating the quantum Fisher information. To realize such an advantage in practice, we then investigate the achievable sensitivities by employing three types of feasible measurements: parity, photon-number-resolving, and homodyne measurements. We here apply a double-port measurement strategy where the photons at each output port of the interferometer are simultaneously detected with the aforementioned types of measurements.
Reflection measurements give access to the complex impedance of a material on a wide frequency range. This is of interest to study the dynamical properties of various materials, for instance disordered superconductors. However reflection measurements made at cryogenic temperature suffer from the difficulty to reliably subtract the circuit contribution. Here we report on the design and first tests of a setup able to precisely calibrate in situ the sample reflection, at 4.2 K and up to 2 GHz, by switching and measuring, during the same cool down, the sample and three calibration standards.
Superconducting circuits are a strong contender for realizing quantum computing systems, and are also successfully used to study quantum optics and hybrid quantum systems. However, their cryogenic operation temperatures and the current lack of coherence-preserving microwave-to-optical conversion solutions have hindered the realization of superconducting quantum networks either spanning different cryogenics systems or larger distances. Here, we report the successful operation of a cryogenic waveguide coherently linking transmon qubits located in two dilution refrigerators separated by a physical distance of five meters. We transfer qubit states and generate entanglement on-demand with average transfer and target state fidelities of 85.8 % and 79.5 %, respectively, between the two nodes of this elementary network. Cryogenic microwave links do provide an opportunity to scale up systems for quantum computing and create local area quantum communication networks over length scales of at least tens of meters.