250 research outputs found

    Nonlinear response of the vacuum Rabi resonance

    Full text link
    On the level of single atoms and photons, the coupling between atoms and the electromagnetic field is typically very weak. By employing a cavity to confine the field, the strength of this interaction can be increased many orders of magnitude to a point where it dominates over any dissipative process. This strong-coupling regime of cavity quantum electrodynamics has been reached for real atoms in optical cavities, and for artificial atoms in circuit QED and quantum-dot systems. A signature of strong coupling is the splitting of the cavity transmission peak into a pair of resolvable peaks when a single resonant atom is placed inside the cavity - an effect known as vacuum Rabi splitting. The circuit QED architecture is ideally suited for going beyond this linear response effect. Here, we show that increasing the drive power results in two unique nonlinear features in the transmitted heterodyne signal: the supersplitting of each vacuum Rabi peak into a doublet, and the appearance of additional peaks with the characteristic sqrt(n) spacing of the Jaynes-Cummings ladder. These constitute direct evidence for the coupling between the quantized microwave field and the anharmonic spectrum of a superconducting qubit acting as an artificial atom.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures. Supplementary Material and Supplementary Movies are available at http://www.eng.yale.edu/rslab/publications.htm

    Quantum Non-demolition Detection of Single Microwave Photons in a Circuit

    Get PDF
    Thorough control of quantum measurement is key to the development of quantum information technologies. Many measurements are destructive, removing more information from the system than they obtain. Quantum non-demolition (QND) measurements allow repeated measurements that give the same eigenvalue. They could be used for several quantum information processing tasks such as error correction, preparation by measurement, and one-way quantum computing. Achieving QND measurements of photons is especially challenging because the detector must be completely transparent to the photons while still acquiring information about them. Recent progress in manipulating microwave photons in superconducting circuits has increased demand for a QND detector which operates in the gigahertz frequency range. Here we demonstrate a QND detection scheme which measures the number of photons inside a high quality-factor microwave cavity on a chip. This scheme maps a photon number onto a qubit state in a single-shot via qubit-photon logic gates. We verify the operation of the device by analyzing the average correlations of repeated measurements, and show that it is 90% QND. It differs from previously reported detectors because its sensitivity is strongly selective to chosen photon number states. This scheme could be used to monitor the state of a photon-based memory in a quantum computer.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, includes supplementary materia

    Single-shot qubit readout in circuit Quantum Electrodynamics

    Get PDF
    The future development of quantum information using superconducting circuits requires Josephson qubits [1] with long coherence times combined to a high-fidelity readout. Major progress in the control of coherence has recently been achieved using circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) architectures [2, 3], where the qubit is embedded in a coplanar waveguide resonator (CPWR) which both provides a well controlled electromagnetic environment and serves as qubit readout. In particular a new qubit design, the transmon, yields reproducibly long coherence times [4, 5]. However, a high-fidelity single-shot readout of the transmon, highly desirable for running simple quantum algorithms or measur- ing quantum correlations in multi-qubit experiments, is still lacking. In this work, we demonstrate a new transmon circuit where the CPWR is turned into a sample-and-hold detector, namely a Josephson Bifurcation Amplifer (JBA) [6, 7], which allows both fast measurement and single-shot discrimination of the qubit states. We report Rabi oscillations with a high visibility of 94% together with dephasing and relaxation times longer than 0:5 \mu\s. By performing two subsequent measurements, we also demonstrate that this new readout does not induce extra qubit relaxation.Comment: 14 pages including 4 figures, preprint forma

    Preparation and Measurement of Three-Qubit Entanglement in a Superconducting Circuit

    Full text link
    Traditionally, quantum entanglement has played a central role in foundational discussions of quantum mechanics. The measurement of correlations between entangled particles can exhibit results at odds with classical behavior. These discrepancies increase exponentially with the number of entangled particles. When entanglement is extended from just two quantum bits (qubits) to three, the incompatibilities between classical and quantum correlation properties can change from a violation of inequalities involving statistical averages to sign differences in deterministic observations. With the ample confirmation of quantum mechanical predictions by experiments, entanglement has evolved from a philosophical conundrum to a key resource for quantum-based technologies, like quantum cryptography and computation. In particular, maximal entanglement of more than two qubits is crucial to the implementation of quantum error correction protocols. While entanglement of up to 3, 5, and 8 qubits has been demonstrated among spins, photons, and ions, respectively, entanglement in engineered solid-state systems has been limited to two qubits. Here, we demonstrate three-qubit entanglement in a superconducting circuit, creating Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states with fidelity of 88%, measured with quantum state tomography. Several entanglement witnesses show violation of bi-separable bounds by 830\pm80%. Our entangling sequence realizes the first step of basic quantum error correction, namely the encoding of a logical qubit into a manifold of GHZ-like states using a repetition code. The integration of encoding, decoding and error-correcting steps in a feedback loop will be the next milestone for quantum computing with integrated circuits.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, and Supplementary Information (4 figures)

    Stabilizing entanglement autonomously between two superconducting qubits

    Full text link
    Quantum error-correction codes would protect an arbitrary state of a multi-qubit register against decoherence-induced errors, but their implementation is an outstanding challenge for the development of large-scale quantum computers. A first step is to stabilize a non-equilibrium state of a simple quantum system such as a qubit or a cavity mode in the presence of decoherence. Several groups have recently accomplished this goal using measurement-based feedback schemes. A next step is to prepare and stabilize a state of a composite system. Here we demonstrate the stabilization of an entangled Bell state of a quantum register of two superconducting qubits for an arbitrary time. Our result is achieved by an autonomous feedback scheme which combines continuous drives along with a specifically engineered coupling between the two-qubit register and a dissipative reservoir. Similar autonomous feedback techniques have recently been used for qubit reset and the stabilization of a single qubit state, as well as for creating and stabilizing states of multipartite quantum systems. Unlike conventional, measurement-based schemes, an autonomous approach counter-intuitively uses engineered dissipation to fight decoherence, obviating the need for a complicated external feedback loop to correct errors, simplifying implementation. Instead the feedback loop is built into the Hamiltonian such that the steady state of the system in the presence of drives and dissipation is a Bell state, an essential building-block state for quantum information processing. Such autonomous schemes, broadly applicable to a variety of physical systems as demonstrated by a concurrent publication with trapped ion qubits, will be an essential tool for the implementation of quantum-error correction.Comment: 39 pages, 7 figure

    Dusty Planetary Systems

    Full text link
    Extensive photometric stellar surveys show that many main sequence stars show emission at infrared and longer wavelengths that is in excess of the stellar photosphere; this emission is thought to arise from circumstellar dust. The presence of dust disks is confirmed by spatially resolved imaging at infrared to millimeter wavelengths (tracing the dust thermal emission), and at optical to near infrared wavelengths (tracing the dust scattered light). Because the expected lifetime of these dust particles is much shorter than the age of the stars (>10 Myr), it is inferred that this solid material not primordial, i.e. the remaining from the placental cloud of gas and dust where the star was born, but instead is replenished by dust-producing planetesimals. These planetesimals are analogous to the asteroids, comets and Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) in our Solar system that produce the interplanetary dust that gives rise to the zodiacal light (tracing the inner component of the Solar system debris disk). The presence of these "debris disks" around stars with a wide range of masses, luminosities, and metallicities, with and without binary companions, is evidence that planetesimal formation is a robust process that can take place under a wide range of conditions. This chapter is divided in two parts. Part I discusses how the study of the Solar system debris disk and the study of debris disks around other stars can help us learn about the formation, evolution and diversity of planetary systems by shedding light on the frequency and timing of planetesimal formation, the location and physical properties of the planetesimals, the presence of long-period planets, and the dynamical and collisional evolution of the system. Part II reviews the physical processes that affect dust particles in the gas-free environment of a debris disk and their effect on the dust particle size and spatial distribution.Comment: 68 pages, 25 figures. To be published in "Solar and Planetary Systems" (P. Kalas and L. French, Eds.), Volume 3 of the series "Planets, Stars and Stellar Systems" (T.D. Oswalt, Editor-in-chief), Springer 201

    Demonstration of Two-Qubit Algorithms with a Superconducting Quantum Processor

    Full text link
    By harnessing the superposition and entanglement of physical states, quantum computers could outperform their classical counterparts in solving problems of technological impact, such as factoring large numbers and searching databases. A quantum processor executes algorithms by applying a programmable sequence of gates to an initialized register of qubits, which coherently evolves into a final state containing the result of the computation. Simultaneously meeting the conflicting requirements of long coherence, state preparation, universal gate operations, and qubit readout makes building quantum processors challenging. Few-qubit processors have already been shown in nuclear magnetic resonance, cold ion trap and optical systems, but a solid-state realization has remained an outstanding challenge. Here we demonstrate a two-qubit superconducting processor and the implementation of the Grover search and Deutsch-Jozsa quantum algorithms. We employ a novel two-qubit interaction, tunable in strength by two orders of magnitude on nanosecond time scales, which is mediated by a cavity bus in a circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) architecture. This interaction allows generation of highly-entangled states with concurrence up to 94%. Although this processor constitutes an important step in quantum computing with integrated circuits, continuing efforts to increase qubit coherence times, gate performance and register size will be required to fulfill the promise of a scalable technology.Comment: 6 pages, 1 table, 4 figures, and Supplementary Information (3 pages, 3 figures); Expanded author list, updated references, and minor improvements to text and figure

    Flow-volume loops derived from three-dimensional echocardiography: a novel approach to the assessment of left ventricular hemodynamics

    Get PDF
    BACKGROUND: This study explores the feasibility of non-invasive evaluation of left ventricular (LV) flow-volume dynamics using 3-dimensional (3D) echocardiography, and the capacity of such an approach to identify altered LV hemodynamic states caused by valvular abnormalities. METHODS: Thirty-one patients with moderate-severe aortic (AS) and mitral (MS) stenoses (21 and 10 patients, respectively) and 10 healthy volunteers underwent 3D echocardiography with full volume acquisition using Philips Sonos 7500 equipment. The digital 3D data were post- processed using TomTec software. LV flow-volume loops were subsequently constructed for each subject by plotting instantaneous LV volume data sampled throughout the cardiac cycle vs. their first derivative representing LV flow. After correction for body surface area, an average flow-volume loop was calculated for each subject group. RESULTS: Flow-volume loops were obtainable in all subjects, except 3 patients with AS. The flow-volume diagrams displayed clear differences in the form and position of the loops between normal individuals and the respective patient groups. In patients with AS, an "obstructive" pattern was observed, with lower flow values during early systole and larger end-systolic volume. On the other hand, patients with MS displayed a "restrictive" flow-volume pattern, with reduced diastolic filling and smaller end-diastolic volume. CONCLUSION: Non-invasive evaluation of LV flow-volume dynamics using 3D-echocardiographic data is technically possible and the approach has a capacity to identify certain specific types of alteration of LV flow-volume pattern caused by valvular abnormalities, thus reflecting underlying hemodynamic states specific for these abnormalities
    corecore