A platform to study many-body physics with photons
Hakan Tureci, Princeton University
The past decade has seen enormous experimental progress in building superconducting electrical circuits featuring artificial atoms subject to the quantized electromagnetic field of microwave photons. The fabrication and control of superconducting circuits has reached a stage where many such elements can be wired up into intricate networks, allowing the preparation and readout of complex quantum states of photons and atoms. The potential of such large-scale circuits for building a quantum information processor is being explored vigorously, an activity that is no longer confined to academic centers, but is also pursued in government laboratories and technology companies. I will focus in my talk on the potential of such circuits for exploring an unusual and interesting regime of quantum many body physics. After reviewing some early work in this field, I will discuss a general protocol that employs photon-mediated interactions between qubits to drive them to a long-distance entangled state with an arbitrarily long lifetime. We find that photon-mediated interactions provide a highly versatile toolbox to engineer the unitary and dissipative dynamics of spatially separated qubits, with important implications for dissipative stabilization of pure many-body states of qubits and other quantum control tasks. This protocol has recently been experimentally demonstrated in a 3D superconducting circuit architecture to dissipatively stabilize a target Bell state of two transmon qubits residing in separate cavities.