All-microwave and low-cost Lamb shift engineering for a fixed frequency multi-level superconducting qubit

Abstract

It is known that the electromagnetic vacuum is responsible for the Lamb shift, which is a crucial phenomenon in quantum electrodynamics (QED). In circuit QED, the readout or bus resonators that are dispersively coupled can result in a significant Lamb shift of the qubit, much larger than that in the original broadband cases. However, previous approaches or proposals for controlling the Lamb shift in circuit QED demand overheads in circuit designs or non-perturbative renormalization of the system's eigenbases, which can impose formidable limitations.In this work, we propose and demonstrate an efficient and cost-effective method for controlling the Lamb shift of fixed-frequency transmons. We employ the drive-induced longitudinal coupling between the transmon and resonator. By simply using an off-resonant monochromatic driving near the resonator frequency, we can modify the Lamb shift by 32 to -30 MHz without facing the aforementioned challenges. Our work establishes an efficient way of engineering the fundamental effects of the electromagnetic vacuum and provides greater flexibility in non-parametric frequency controls of multilevel systems. In particular, this Lamb shift engineering scheme enables individually control of the frequency of transmons, even without individual drive lines