Generating nonclassical photon-states via longitudinal couplings between superconducting qubits and microwave fields

Besides the conventional transverse couplings between superconducting qubits (SQs) and electromagnetic fields, there are additional longitudinal couplings when the inversion symmetry of the potential energies of the SQs is broken. We study nonclassical-state generation in a SQ which is driven by a classical field and coupled to a single-mode microwave field. We find that the classical field can induce transitions between two energy levels of the SQs, which either generate or annihilate, in a controllable way, different photon numbers of the cavity field. The effective Hamiltonians of these classical-field-assisted multiphoton processes of the single-mode cavity field are very similar to those for cold ions, confined to a coaxial RF-ion trap and driven by a classical field. We show that arbitrary superpositions of Fock states can be more efficiently generated using these controllable multiphoton transitions, in contrast to the single-photon resonant transition when there is only a SQ-field transverse coupling. The experimental feasibility for different SQs is also discussed.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figure

Tunable Electromagnetically Induced Transparency and Absorption with Dressed Superconducting Qubits

Electromagnetically induced transparency and absorption (EIT and EIA) are usually demonstrated by three-level atomic or atom-like systems. In contrast to the usual case, we theoretically study the EIT and EIA in an equivalent three-level system, which is constructed by dressing a superconducting two-level system (qubit) dressed by a single-mode cavity field. In this equivalent system, we find that both the EIT and the EIA can be tuned by controlling the level-spacing of the superconducting qubit and hence controlling the dressed system. This tunability is due to the dressed relaxation and dephasing rates which vary parametrically with the level-spacing of the original qubit and thus affect the transition properties of the dressed qubit and the susceptibility. These dressed relaxation and dephasing rates characterize the reaction of the dressed qubit to an incident probe field. We also use recent experimental data on superconducting qubits (charge, phase, and flux qubits) to demonstrate our approach and show the possibility of experimentally realizing this proposal.Comment: 13 page