Publications

Single-photon nonlinearity, namely, the change in the response of the system as the result of the interaction with a single photon, is generally considered an inherent property of a single quantum emitter. Although the dependence on the number of emitters is well understood for the case of two-level systems, deterministic operations such as single-photon switching or photon-atom gates inherently require more complex level structures. Here, we theoretically consider single-photon switching in ensembles of emitters with a Λ-level scheme and show that the switching efficiency vanishes with the number of emitters. Interestingly, the mechanism behind this behavior is the quantum Zeno effect, manifested in a slowdown of the photon-controlled dynamics of the atomic ground states.

Decoherence in qubits, caused by their interaction with a noisy environment, poses a significant challenge to developing reliable quantum processors. Monitoring the qubit's environment enables not only to identify decoherence events but also to reverse these errors, thereby restoring the qubit coherence. This approach is particularly beneficial for superconducting cavity qubits, whose unavoidable interaction with auxiliary transmons impacts their coherence. In this work, we uncover the intricate dynamics of cavity decoherence by tracking the noisy trajectory of a transmon acting as the cavity's environment. Using real-time feedback, we successfully recover the lost coherence of the cavity qubit, achieving a fivefold increase in its dephasing time. Alternatively, by detecting transmon errors and converting them into erasures, we improve the cavity phase coherence by more than an order of magnitude. These advances are essential for implementing long-lived cavity qubits with high-fidelity gates and can enable more efficient bosonic quantum error correction codes.

Storing quantum information for an extended period of time is essential for running quantum algorithms with low errors. Currently, superconducting quantum memories have coherence times of a few milliseconds, and surpassing this performance has remained an outstanding challenge. In this work, we report a single-photon qubit encoded in a novel superconducting cavity with a coherence time of 34 ms, representing an order of magnitude improvement compared to previous demonstrations. We use this long-lived quantum memory to store a Schrödinger cat state with a record size of 1024 photons, indicating the cavity's potential for bosonic quantum error correction.

Bosonic qubits encoded in continuous-variable systems provide a promising alternative to two-level qubits for quantum computation and communication. So far, photon loss has been the dominant source of errors in bosonic qubits, but the significant reduction of photon loss in recent bosonic qubit experiments suggests that dephasing errors should also be considered. However, a detailed understanding of the combined photon loss and dephasing channel is lacking. Here, we show that, unlike its constituent parts, the combined loss-dephasing channel is non-degradable, pointing towards a richer structure of this channel. We provide bounds for the capacity of the loss-dephasing channel and use numerical optimization to find optimal single-mode codes for a wide range of error rates.

Ancilla systems are often indispensable to universal control of a nearly isolated quantum system. However, ancilla systems are typically more vulnerable to environmental noise, which limits the performance of such ancilla-assisted quantum control. To address this challenge of ancilla-induced decoherence, we propose a general framework that integrates quantum control and quantum error correction, so that we can achieve robust quantum gates resilient to ancilla noise. We introduce the path independence criterion for fault-tolerant quantum gates against ancilla errors. As an example, a path-independent gate is provided for superconducting circuits with a hardware-efficient design.

To reach their full potential, quantum computers need to be resilient to noise and decoherence. In such a fault-tolerant quantum computer, errors must be corrected in real time to prevent them from propagating between components(1,2). This requirement is especially pertinent while applying quantum gates, where the interaction between components can cause errors to spread quickly throughout the system. However, the large overhead involved in most fault-tolerant architectures(2,3) makes implementing these systems a daunting task, motivating the search for hardware-efficient alternatives(4,5). Here, we present a gate enacted by an ancilla transmon on a cavity-encoded logical qubit that is fault-tolerant to ancilla decoherence and compatible with logical error correction. We maintain the purity of the encoded qubit by correcting ancilla-induced errors in real time, yielding a reduction of the logical gate error by a factor of two in the presence of naturally occurring decoherence. We also demonstrate a sixfold suppression of the gate error with increased ancilla relaxation errors and a fourfold suppression with increased ancilla dephasing errors. The results demonstrate that bosonic logical qubits can be controlled by error-prone ancilla qubits without inheriting the ancilla's inferior performance. As such, error-corrected ancilla-enabled gates are an important step towards fault-tolerant processing of bosonic qubits.Error-corrected quantum gates that can tolerate dominant errors during the execution of quantum operations have been demonstrated. Substantial improvement of the gate fidelity sheds light on fault-tolerant universal quantum computation.

Qubit measurements are central to quantum information processing. In the field of superconducting qubits, standard readout techniques are limited not only by the signal-to-noise ratio, but also by state relaxation during the measurement. In this work, we demonstrate that the limitation due to relaxation can be suppressed by using the many-level Hilbert space of superconducting circuits: In a multilevel encoding, the measurement is corrupted only when multiple errors occur. Employing this technique, we show that we can directly resolve transmon gate errors at the level of one part in 10(3). Extending this idea, we apply the same principles to the measurement of a logical qubit encoded in a bosonic mode and detected with a transmon ancilla, implementing a proposal by Hann et al. [Phys. Rev. A 98, 022305 (2018)]. Qubit state assignments are made based on a sequence of repeated readouts, further reducing the overall infidelity. This approach is quite general, and several encodings are studied; the codewords are more distinguishable when the distance between them is increased with respect to photon loss. The trade-off between multiple readouts and state relaxation is explored and shown to be consistent with the photon-loss model. We report a logical assignment infidelity of 5.8 x 10(-5) for a Fock-based encoding and 4.2 x 10 (-3) for a quantum error correction code (the S = 2, N = 1 binomial code). Our results not only improve the fidelity of quantum information applications, but also enable more precise characterization of process or gate errors.

Deterministic quantum interactions between single photons and single quantum emitters are a vital building block towards the distribution of quantum information between remote systems(1-4). Deterministic photon-atom state transfer has previously been demonstrated with protocols that include active feedback or synchronized control pulses(5-10). Here we demonstrate a passive swap operation between the states of a single photon and a single atom. The underlying mechanism is single-photon Raman interaction(11-15)-an interference-based scheme that leads to deterministic interaction between two photonic modes and the two ground states of a Lambda-system. Using a nanofibre-coupled microsphere resonator coupled to single Rb atoms, we swap a photonic qubit into the atom and back, demonstrating fidelities exceeding the classical threshold of 2/3 in both directions. In this simultaneous write and read process, the returning photon, which carries the readout of the atomic qubit, also heralds the successful arrival of the write photon. Requiring no control fields, this single-step gate takes place automatically at the timescale of the atom's cavity-enhanced spontaneous emission. Applicable to any waveguide-coupled Lambda-system, this mechanism, which can also be harnessed to construct universal gates(16,17), provides a versatile building block for the modular scaling up of quantum information systems.

A critical component of any quantum error-correcting scheme is detection of errors by using an ancilla system. However, errors occurring in the ancilla can propagate onto the logical qubit, irreversibly corrupting the encoded information. We demonstrate a fault-tolerant error-detection scheme that suppresses spreading of ancilla errors by a factor of 5, while maintaining the assignment fidelity. The same method is used to prevent propagation of ancilla excitations, increasing the logical qubit dephasing time by an order of magnitude. Our approach is hardware-efficient, as it uses a single multilevel transmon ancilla and a cavity-encoded logical qubit, whose interaction is engineered in situ by using an off-resonant sideband drive. The results demonstrate that hardware-efficient approaches that exploit system-specific error models can yield advances toward fault-tolerant quantum computation.

Interference experiments provide a simple yet powerful tool to unravel fundamental features of quantum physics. Here we engineer a driven, time-dependent bilinear coupling that can be tuned to implement a robust 50:50 beam splitter between stationary states stored in two superconducting cavities in a three-dimensional architecture. With this, we realize high-contrast Hong-Ou-Mandel interference between two spectrally detuned stationary modes. We demonstrate that this coupling provides an efficient method for measuring the quantum state overlap between arbitrary states of the two cavities. Finally, we showcase concatenated beam splitters and differential phase shifters to implement cascaded Mach-Zehnder interferometers, which can control the signature of the two-photon interference on demand. Our results pave the way toward implementation of scalable boson sampling, the application of linear optical quantum computing protocols in the microwave domain, and quantum algorithms between long-lived bosonic memories.

Entangling gates between qubits are a crucial component for performing algorithms in quantum computers. However, any quantum algorithm must ultimately operate on error-protected logical qubits encoded in high-dimensional systems. Typically, logical qubits are encoded in multiple two-level systems, but entangling gates operating on such qubits are highly complex and have not yet been demonstrated. Here we realize a controlled NOT (CNOT) gate between two multiphoton qubits in two microwave cavities. In this approach, we encode a qubit in the high-dimensional space of a single cavity mode, rather than in multiple two-level systems. We couple two such encoded qubits together through a transmon, which is driven by an RF pump to apply the gate within 190 ns. This is two orders of magnitude shorter than the decoherence time of the transmon, enabling a high-fidelity gate operation. These results are an important step towards universal algorithms on error-corrected logical qubits.

The long-standing goal of deterministic quantum interactions between single photons and single atoms was recently realized in various experiments. Among these, an appealing demonstration relied on single-photon Raman interaction (SPRINT) in a three-level atom coupled to a single-mode waveguide. In essence, the interference-based process of SPRINT deterministically swaps the qubits encoded in a single photon and a single atom, without the need for additional control pulses. It can also be harnessed to construct passive entangling quantum gates, and can therefore form the basis for scalable quantum networks in which communication between the nodes is carried out only by single-photon pulses. Here we present an analytical and numerical study of SPRINT, characterizing its limitations and defining parameters for its optimal operation. Specifically, we study the effect of losses, imperfect polarization, and the presence of multiple excited states. In all cases we discuss strategies for restoring the operation of SPRINT.

Using single-photon Raman interaction, we demonstrate a deterministic and passive SWAP gate and quantum memory between the states of a single photon and a single ⁸⁷Rb atom coupled to high-Q microresonator.

Removing a single photon from a pulse is one of the most elementary operations that can be performed on light, having both fundamental significance and practical applications in quantum communication and computation. So far, photon subtraction, in which the removed photon is detected and therefore irreversibly lost, has been implemented in a probabilistic manner with inherently low success rates using low-reflectivity beam splitters. Here we demonstrate a scheme for the deterministic extraction of a single photon from an incoming pulse. The removed photon is diverted to a different mode, enabling its use for other purposes, such as a photon number-splitting attack on quantum key distribution protocols. Our implementation makes use of single-photon Raman interaction (SPRINT) with a single atom near a nanofibre-coupled microresonator. The single-photon extraction probability in our current realization is limited mostly by linear loss, yet probabilities close to unity should be attainable with realistic experimental parameters.

We demonstrate a passive scheme for deterministic interactions between a single photon and a single atom. Relying on single-photon Raman interaction (SPRINT), this control-fields free scheme swaps a flying qubit, encoded in the two possible input modes of a photon, with a stationary qubit, encoded in the two ground states of the atom, and can be also harnessed to perform universal quantum gates. Using SPRINT we experimentally demonstrated all-optical switching of single photons by single photons, and deterministic extraction of a single photon from an optical pulse. Applicable to any atom-like Lambda system, SPRINT provides a versatile building block for scalable quantum networks based on completely passive nodes interconnected and activated solely by single photons.

Spectroscopy of whispering-gallery mode microresonators has become a powerful scientific tool, enabling the detection of single viruses, nanoparticles and even single molecules. Yet the demonstrated timescale of these schemes has been limited so far to milliseconds or more. Here we introduce a scheme that is orders of magnitude faster, capable of capturing complete spectral snapshots at nanosecond timescales - cavity ring-up spectroscopy. Based on sharply rising detuned probe pulses, cavity ring-up spectroscopy combines the sensitivity of heterodyne measurements with the highest-possible, transform-limited acquisition rate. As a demonstration, we capture spectra of microtoroid resonators at time intervals as short as 16 ns, directly monitoring submicrosecond dynamics of their optomechanical vibrations, thermorefractive response and Kerr nonlinearity. Cavity ring-up spectroscopy holds promise for the study of fast biological processes such as enzyme kinetics, protein folding and light harvesting, with applications in other fields such as cavity quantum electrodynamics and pulsed optomechanics.

We demonstrate deterministic photon-atom and photon-photon interactions with a single atom coupled to a high-Q fiber-coupled microresonator. Based on Deterministic One Photon Raman Interaction (DOPRI), this scheme can form the basis for all-optical quantum information processing.

We demonstrate all-optical deterministic photon-atom and photon-photon interactions with a single Rb atom coupled to high-Q fiber-coupled microresonator. This scheme enables all-optical photon routing, passive quantum memory and quantum gates activated solely by single photons.

The prospect of quantum networks, in which quantum information is carried by single photons in photonic circuits, has long been the driving force behind the effort to achieve all-optical routing of single photons.We realized a single-photon-activated switch capable of routing a photon from any of its two inputs to any of its two outputs. Our device is based on a single atom coupled to a fiber-coupled, chip-based microresonator. A single reflected control photon toggles the switch from high reflection (R ∼ 65%) to high transmission (T ∼ 90%), with an average of ∼1.5 control photons per switching event (∼3, including linear losses). No additional control fields are required.The control and target photons are both in-fiber and practically identical, making this scheme compatible with scalable architectures for quantum information processing.

We experimentally demonstrate first-order (fold) and second-order (cusp) catastrophes in the density of an atomic cloud reflected from an optical barrier in the presence of gravity and show their corresponding universal asymptotic behavior. These catastrophes, arising from classical dynamics, enable robust, field-free refocusing of an expanding atomic cloud with a wide velocity distribution. Specifically, the density attained at the cusp point in our experiment reached 65% of the peak density of the atoms in the trap prior to their release. We thereby add caustics to the various phenomena with parallels in optics that can be harnessed for manipulation of cold atoms. The structural stability of catastrophes provides inherent robustness against variations in the system's dynamics and initial conditions, making them suitable for manipulation of atoms under imperfect conditions and limited controllability.

We demonstrate a new type of weak measurement based on the dynamics of spontaneous emission. The pointer in our scheme is given by the Lorentzian distribution characterizing atomic exponential decay via emission of a single photon. We thus introduce weak measurement, so far demonstrated nearly exclusively with laser beams and Gaussian statistics, into the quantum regime of single emitters and single quanta, enabling the exploitation of a wide class of sources that are abundant in nature. We describe a complete analogy between our scheme and weak measurement with conventional Gaussian pointers. Instead of a shift in the mean of a Gaussian distribution, an imaginary weak value is exhibited in our scheme by a significantly slower-than-natural exponential distribution of emitted photons at the postselected polarization, leading to a large shift in their mean arrival time. The dynamics of spontaneous emission offer a broader view of the measurement process than is usually considered within the weak measurement formalism. Our scheme opens the path for the use of atoms and atomlike systems as sensitive probes in weak measurements, one example being optical magnetometry.

The most simple and seemingly straightforward application of the photon blockade effect, in which the transport of one photon prevents the transport of others, would be to separate two incoming indistinguishable photons to different output ports. We show that time-energy uncertainty relations inherently prevent this ideal situation when the blockade is implemented by a two-level system. The fundamental nature of this limit is revealed in the fact that photon blockade in the strong coupling regime of cavity QED, resulting from the nonlinearity of the Jaynes-Cummings energy level structure, exhibits efficiency and temporal behavior identical to those of photon blockade in the bad cavity regime, where the underlying nonlinearity is that of the atom itself. We demonstrate that this limit can be exceeded, yet not avoided, by exploiting time-energy entanglement between the incident photons. Finally, we show how this limit can be circumvented completely by using a three-level atom coupled to a single-sided cavity, enabling an ideal and robust photon routing mechanism.

The first observation of two-photon emission from semiconductors and its applications are presented theoretically and experimentally. Entanglement sources are proposed and two-photon gain is measured in electrically-pumped devices at room temperature, promising giant pulse generation.

We investigate a new phenomenon of semiconductor two-photon emission presenting the first experiments. This allows implementation of compact highly-efficient room-temperature sources of entangled (for microcavity interband transitions) and hyperentangled (for intersubband transitions) photons.

A novel phenomenon of semiconductor two-photon emission is presented experimentally. Based on this effect, we propose implementations of compact highly-efficient room-temperature sources of entangled photons (inter-band transitions in a microcavity) and hyperentangled photons (inter-subband transitions).