Chiral ground-state currents of interacting photons in a synthetic magnetic field

By P. Roushan, C. Neill, A. Megrant, Yu Chen, Ryan Babbush, R. Barends, B. Campbell, Zijun Chen, B. Chiaro, A. Dunsworth and 15 more. Nature Physics, 2016

432 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The intriguing many-body phases of quantum matter arise from the interplay of particle interactions, spatial symmetries, and external fields. Generating these phases in an engineered system could provide deeper insight into their nature. Using superconducting qubits, we simultaneously realize synthetic magnetic fields and strong particle interactions, which are among the essential elements for studying quantum magnetism and fractional quantum Hall phenomena. The artificial magnetic fields are synthesized by sinusoidally modulating the qubit couplings. In a closed loop formed by the three qubits, we observe the directional circulation of photons, a signature of broken time-reversal symmetry. We demonstrate strong interactions through the creation of photon vacancies, or ‘holes’, which circulate in the opposite direction. The combination of these key elements results in chiral ground-state currents. Our work introduces an experimental platform for engineering quantum phases of strongly interacting photons. Superconducting circuits, coupled to form a ring in which a photonic excitation can circulate between sites, are established as a versatile platform for studying the interplay of strong particle interactions and external fields.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fc7b0df06265ad397b9052d2cc0d93728bddb3f3

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Citations in the corpus

Artificial gauge fields in materials and engineered systems (2017, neutral): “of the same “resonant-shaking” technique in order to engineer artificial magnetic fields, for instance, with cold atoms [59], ions [64], or superconducting circuits [154].”
Microwave photonics with superconducting quantum circuits (2017, background): “a superconducting circuit where three transmon qubits were coupled in a ring and their couplings modulated in such a way [252].”
Observation of a Dissipative Phase Transition in a One-Dimensional Circuit QED Lattice (2016, background): “and chiral ground state currents in a cavity trimer [19].”
Low-Depth Quantum Simulation of Materials (2017, background): “[33] P Roushan, C Neill, A Megrant, Y Chen, R Babbush, R Barends, B Campbell, Z Chen, B Chiaro, A Dunsworth, A Fowler, E Jeffrey, J Kelly, E Lucero, J Mutus, P J J O’Malley, M Neeley, C Quintana, D Sank, A Vainsencher, J Wenner, T White, E Kapit, H Neven, and J Martinis, “Chiral ground-state current”
Quantum simulation with interacting photons (2016, methodology): “The dynamical modulation of a coupling circuit for engineering an artificial gauge field has recently been demonstrated in an experiment by Roushan et al. [217].”
Realization of an anomalous Floquet topological system with ultracold atoms (2020, background): “Floquet engineering [1–3] has found widespread applications for the realization of out-of-equilibrium manybody systems with novel properties in systems of ultracold atoms [4, 5], photonics [6, 7], superconducting qubits [8] and graphene [9].”
Roadmap on topological photonics (2022, methodology): “Reprinted by permission from Springer Nature Customer Service Centre GmbH: Springer Nature, Nature Physics [119], © 2016, Nature Publishing Group.”