Electron spins and photons are complementary quantum-mechanical objects that can be used to carry, manipulate, and transform quantum information. To combine these resources, it is desirable to ...achieve the coherent coupling of a single spin to photons stored in a superconducting resonator. Using a circuit design based on a nanoscale spin valve, we coherently hybridize the individual spin and charge states of a double quantum dot while preserving spin coherence. This scheme allows us to achieve spin-photon coupling up to the megahertz range at the single-spin level. The cooperativity is found to reach 2.3, and the spin coherence time is about 60 nanoseconds. We thereby demonstrate a mesoscopic device suitable for nondestructive spin readout and distant spin coupling.
The interplay of superconductivity with non-trivial spin textures is promising for the engineering of non-Abelian Majorana quasiparticles. Spin-orbit coupling is crucial for the topological ...protection of Majorana modes as it forbids other trivial excitations at low energy but is typically intrinsic to the material
. Here, we show that coupling to a magnetic texture can induce both a strong spin-orbit coupling of 1.1 meV and a Zeeman effect in a carbon nanotube. Both of these features are revealed through oscillations of superconductivity-induced subgap states under a change in the magnetic texture. Furthermore, we find a robust zero-energy state-the hallmark of devices hosting localized Majorana modes-at zero magnetic field. Our findings are generalizable to any low-dimensional conductor, and future work could include microwave spectroscopy and braiding operations, which are at the heart of modern schemes for topological quantum computation.
Mesoscopic circuits can be coupled to microwave cavities to form hybrid light-matter systems. This emerging field represents an intermediate regime between standard cavity and circuit quantum ...electrodynamics. In this paper, the authors develop a general method based on a photonic pseudo-potential to describe the electric coupling between electrons in a nanocircuit and cavity photons. Understanding the interaction between cavity photons and electronic nanocircuits is crucial for the development of mesoscopic quantum electrodynamics (QED). One has to combine ingredients from atomic cavity QED, such as orbital degrees of freedom, with tunneling physics and strong cavity field inhomogeneities, specific to superconducting circuit QED. It is therefore necessary to introduce a formalism which bridges between these two domains. We develop a general method based on a photonic pseudopotential to describe the electric coupling between electrons in a nanocircuit and cavity photons. In this picture, photons can induce simultaneously orbital energy shifts, tunneling, and local orbital transitions. We study in detail the elementary example of a single quantum dot with a single normal metal reservoir, coupled to a cavity. Photon-induced tunneling terms lead to a nonuniversal relation between the cavity frequency pull and the damping pull. Our formalism can also be applied to multiple quantum dot circuits, molecular circuits, quantum point contacts, metallic tunnel junctions, and superconducting nanostructures enclosing Andreev bound states or Majorana bound states, for instance.
The recent development of hybrid circuit quantum electrodynamics allows one to study how cavity photons interact with a system driven out of equilibrium by fermionic reservoirs. We study here one of ...the simplest combination: a double quantum dot coupled to a single mode of the electromagnetic field. We are able to couple resonantly the charge levels of a carbon-nanotube-based double dot to cavity photons. We perform a microwave readout of the charge states of this system, which allows us to unveil features of the out-of-equilibrium charge dynamics, otherwise invisible in the DC current. We extract the relaxation rate, dephasing rate, and photon number of the hybrid system using a theory based on a master equation technique. These findings open the path for manipulating other degrees of freedom, e.g., the spin and/or the valley in nanotube-based double dots using microwave light.
We report on conductance measurements in carbon nanotube based double quantum dots connected to two normal electrodes and a central superconducting finger. By operating our devices as beam splitters, ...we provide evidence for crossed Andreev reflections tunable in situ. This opens an avenue to more sophisticated quantum opticslike experiments with spin entangled electrons.
We demonstrate a hybrid architecture consisting of a quantum dot circuit coupled to a single mode of the electromagnetic field. We use single wall carbon nanotube based circuits inserted in ...superconducting microwave cavities. By probing the nanotube dot using a dispersive readout in the Coulomb blockade and the Kondo regime, we determine an electron-photon coupling strength which should enable circuit QED experiments with more complex quantum dot circuits.
We report on the electron analog of the single-photon gun. On-demand single-electron injection in a quantum conductor was obtained using a quantum dot connected to the conductor via a tunnel barrier. ...Electron emission was triggered by the application of a potential step that compensated for the dot-charging energy. Depending on the barrier transparency, the quantum emission time ranged from 0.1 to 10 nanoseconds. The single-electron source should prove useful for the use of quantum bits in ballistic conductors. Additionally, periodic sequences of single-electron emission and absorption generate a quantized alternating current.
Abstract
The control of light-matter interaction at the most elementary level has become an important resource for quantum technologies. Implementing such interfaces in the THz range remains an ...outstanding problem. Here, we couple a single electron trapped in a carbon nanotube quantum dot to a THz resonator. The resulting light-matter interaction reaches the deep strong coupling regime that induces a THz energy gap in the carbon nanotube solely by the vacuum fluctuations of the THz resonator. This is directly confirmed by transport measurements. Such a phenomenon which is the exact counterpart of inhibition of spontaneous emission in atomic physics opens the path to the readout of non-classical states of light using electrical current. This would be a particularly useful resource and perspective for THz quantum optics.
Engineering the interaction between light and matter is an important goal in the emerging field of quantum opto-electronics. Thanks to the use of cavity quantum electrodynamics architectures, one can ...envision a fully hybrid multiplexing of quantum conductors. Here we use such an architecture to couple two quantum dot circuits. Our quantum dots are separated by 200 times their own size, with no direct tunnel and electrostatic couplings between them. We demonstrate their interaction, mediated by the cavity photons. This could be used to scale up quantum bit architectures based on quantum dot circuits or simulate on-chip phonon-mediated interactions between strongly correlated electrons.
The ability to control electronic states at the nanoscale has contributed to our modern understanding of condensed matter. In particular, quantum dot circuits represent model systems for the study of ...strong electronic correlations, epitomized by the Kondo effect. We use circuit quantum electrodynamics architectures to study the internal degrees of freedom of this many-body phenomenon. Specifically, we couple a quantum dot to a high-quality-factor microwave cavity to measure with exceptional sensitivity the dot's electronic compressibility, that is, its ability to accommodate charges. Because electronic compressibility corresponds solely to the charge response of the electronic system, it is not equivalent to the conductance, which generally involves other degrees of freedom such as spin. Here, by performing dual conductance and compressibility measurements in the Kondo regime, we uncover directly the charge dynamics of this peculiar mechanism of electron transfer. The Kondo resonance, visible in transport measurements, is found to be 'transparent' to microwave photons trapped in the high-quality cavity, thereby revealing that (in such a many-body resonance) finite conduction is achieved from a charge frozen by Coulomb interaction. This freezing of charge dynamics is in contrast to the physics of a free electron gas. We anticipate that the tools of cavity quantum electrodynamics could be used in other types of mesoscopic circuits with many-body correlations, providing a model system in which to perform quantum simulation of fermion-boson problems.
PDF
