An approach toward an analysis of the pattern recognition involved in the stellar orientation of birds

A conditioning method was used to investigate the orientational responses of ducks as affected by manipulations of the stellar patterns in a planetarium. Under simulated natural skies it was possible to train a bird to a particular direction successively under all positions of the rotating sphere at a constant latitude. The responses were independent of the phase relationships between local time, season, and appearance of the sky provided the bird had been trained under the particular sector of the sphere some time before

Static flux bias of a flux qubit using persistent current trapping

Qubits based on the magnetic flux degree of freedom require a flux bias, whose stability and precision strongly affect the qubit performance, up to a point of forbidding the qubit operation. Moreover, in the perspective of multiqubit systems, it must be possible to flux-bias each qubit independently, hence avoiding the traditional use of externally generated magnetic fields in favour of on-chip techniques that minimize cross-couplings. The solution discussed in this paper exploits a persistent current, trapped in a superconducting circuit integrated on chip that can be inductively coupled with an individual qubit. The circuit does not make use of resistive elements that can be detrimental for the qubit coherence. The trapping procedure allows to control and change stepwise the amount of stored current; after that, the circuit can be completely disconnected from the external sources. We show in a practical case how this works and how to drive the bias circuit at the required value.Comment: 5 figures submitted to Superconductor Science and Technolog

Characterizing Quantum Microwave Radiation and its Entanglement with Superconducting Qubits using Linear Detectors

Recent progress in the development of superconducting circuits has enabled the realization of interesting sources of nonclassical radiation at microwave frequencies. Here, we discuss field quadrature detection schemes for the experimental characterization of itinerant microwave photon fields and their entanglement correlations with stationary qubits. In particular, we present joint state tomography methods of a radiation field mode and a two-level system. Including the case of finite quantum detection efficiency, we relate measured photon field statistics to generalized quasi-probability distributions and statistical moments for one-channel and two-channel detection. We also present maximum-likelihood methods to reconstruct density matrices from measured field quadrature histograms. Our theoretical investigations are supported by the presentation of experimental data, for which microwave quantum fields beyond the single-photon and Gaussian level have been prepared and reconstructed.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figure

Resolving photon number states in a superconducting circuit

Electromagnetic signals are always composed of photons, though in the circuit domain those signals are carried as voltages and currents on wires, and the discreteness of the photon's energy is usually not evident. However, by coupling a superconducting qubit to signals on a microwave transmission line, it is possible to construct an integrated circuit where the presence or absence of even a single photon can have a dramatic effect. This system is called circuit quantum electrodynamics (QED) because it is the circuit equivalent of the atom-photon interaction in cavity QED. Previously, circuit QED devices were shown to reach the resonant strong coupling regime, where a single qubit can absorb and re-emit a single photon many times. Here, we report a circuit QED experiment which achieves the strong dispersive limit, a new regime of cavity QED in which a single photon has a large effect on the qubit or atom without ever being absorbed. The hallmark of this strong dispersive regime is that the qubit transition can be resolved into a separate spectral line for each photon number state of the microwave field. The strength of each line is a measure of the probability to find the corresponding photon number in the cavity. This effect has been used to distinguish between coherent and thermal fields and could be used to create a photon statistics analyzer. Since no photons are absorbed by this process, one should be able to generate non-classical states of light by measurement and perform qubit-photon conditional logic, the basis of a logic bus for a quantum computer.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, hi-res version at http://www.eng.yale.edu/rslab/papers/numbersplitting_hires.pd

AC induced damping of a fluxon in long Josephson junction

We present a theoretical and experimental study of Josephson vortex (fluxon) moving in the presence of spatially homogeneous dc and ac bias currents. By mapping this problem to the problem of calculating the current-voltage characteristic of a small Josephson junction, we derive the dependence of the average fluxon velocity on the dc bias current. In particular we find that the low frequency ac bias current results in an additional nonlinear damping of fluxon motion. Such ac induced damping crucially depends on the intrinsic damping parameter and increases drastically as this parameter is reduced. We find a good agreement of the analysis with both the direct numerical simulations and the experimentally measured current-voltage characteristics of a long annular Josephson junction with one trapped fluxon.Comment: Physical Review B, in pres

Spin-glasses in optical cavity

Recent advances in nanofabrication and optical control have garnered tremendous interest in multi-qubit-cavity systems. Here we analyze a spin-glass version of such a nanostructure, solving analytically for the phase diagrams in both the matter and radiation subsystems in the replica symmetric regime. Interestingly, the resulting phase transitions turn out to be tunable simply by varying the matter-radiation coupling strength

Probing quantum coherence in qubit arrays

We discuss how the observation of population localization effects in periodically driven systems can be used to quantify the presence of quantum coherence in interacting qubit arrays. Essential for our proposal is the fact that these localization effects persist beyond tight-binding Hamiltonian models. This result is of special practical relevance in those situations where direct system probing using tomographic schemes becomes infeasible beyond a very small number of qubits. As a proof of principle, we study analytically a Hamiltonian system consisting of a chain of superconducting flux qubits under the effect of a periodic driving. We provide extensive numerical support of our results in the simple case of a two-qubits chain. For this system we also study the robustness of the scheme against different types of noise and disorder. We show that localization effects underpinned by quantum coherent interactions should be observable within realistic parameter regimes in chains with a larger number o

Coulomb-assisted braiding of Majorana fermions in a Josephson junction array

We show how to exchange (braid) Majorana fermions in a network of superconducting nanowires by control over Coulomb interactions rather than tunneling. Even though Majorana fermions are charge-neutral quasiparticles (equal to their own antiparticle), they have an effective long-range interaction through the even-odd electron number dependence of the superconducting ground state. The flux through a split Josephson junction controls this interaction via the ratio of Josephson and charging energies, with exponential sensitivity. By switching the interaction on and off in neighboring segments of a Josephson junction array, the non-Abelian braiding statistics can be realized without the need to control tunnel couplings by gate electrodes. This is a solution to the problem how to operate on topological qubits when gate voltages are screened by the superconductor

Entanglement Sudden Death in Band Gaps

Using the pseudomode method, we evaluate exactly time-dependent entanglement for two independent qubits, each coupled to a non-Markovian structured environment. Our results suggest a possible way to control entanglement sudden death by modifying the qubit-pseudomode detuning and the spectrum of the reservoirs. Particularly, in environments structured by a model of a density-of-states gap which has two poles, entanglement trapping and prevention of entanglement sudden death occur in the weak-coupling regime

Photodetection of propagating quantum microwaves in circuit QED

We develop the theory of a metamaterial composed of an array of discrete quantum absorbers inside a one-dimensional waveguide that implements a high-efficiency microwave photon detector. A basic design consists of a few metastable superconducting nanocircuits spread inside and coupled to a one-dimensional waveguide in a circuit QED setup. The arrival of a {\it propagating} quantum microwave field induces an irreversible change in the population of the internal levels of the absorbers, due to a selective absorption of photon excitations. This design is studied using a formal but simple quantum field theory, which allows us to evaluate the single-photon absorption efficiency for one and many absorber setups. As an example, we consider a particular design that combines a coplanar coaxial waveguide with superconducting phase qubits, a natural but not exclusive playground for experimental implementations. This work and a possible experimental realization may stimulate the possible arrival of "all-optical" quantum information processing with propagating quantum microwaves, where a microwave photodetector could play a key role.Comment: 27 pages, submitted to Physica Scripta for Nobel Symposium on "Qubits for Quantum Information", 200