Controlled release of multiphoton quantum states from a microwave cavity memory

By W. Pfaff, C. Axline, Luke D. Burkhart, Uri Vool, P. Reinhold, Luigi Frunzio, Liang Jiang, Michel H. Devoret, Robert J. Schoelkopf. Nature Physics, 2016

132 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Signal transmission loss in a quantum network can be overcome by encoding quantum states in complex multiphoton fields. But transmitting quantum information encoded in this way requires that locally stored states can be converted to propagating fields. Here we experimentally show the controlled conversion of multiphoton quantum states, such as Schrödinger cat states, from a microwave cavity quantum memory into propagating modes. By parametric conversion using the nonlinearity of a single Josephson junction, we can release the cavity state in ∼500 ns, about three orders of magnitude faster than its intrinsic lifetime. This mechanism—which we dub Schrödinger’s catapult—faithfully converts arbitrary cavity fields to travelling signals with an estimated efficiency of >90%, enabling the on-demand generation of complex itinerant quantum states. Importantly, the release process can be precisely controlled on fast timescales, allowing us to generate entanglement between the cavity and the travelling mode by partial conversion. The ability to transfer quantum information from a memory to a flying qubit is important for building quantum networks. The very fast release of a multiphoton state in a microwave cavity memory into propagating modes is demonstrated.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7e7ebc5f16eae72646e6bdee357816e5a9fd1aa3

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Citations in the corpus

Circuit quantum electrodynamics (2020, methodology): “The experiments of Axline et al. (2018) and Campagne-Ibarcq et al. (2018) reported similar Bell-state fidelities using different approaches to prepare time-symmetric propagating photons (Pfaff et al., 2017).”
On-demand quantum state transfer and entanglement between remote microwave cavity memories (2017, background): “If the initial state is a single photon, this results in entanglement between the memory and the emitted radiation 20 .”