Superconducting flux quantum circuits [Elektronische Ressource] : characterization, quantum coherence, and controlled symmetry breaking / Frank Deppe

Frank Deppe

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• Physik

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• Publié par: technische_universitat_munchen
• Publié le: 01 janvier 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 64
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 9 Mo

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Physik-Department
Superconducting flux quantum circuits:
characterization, quantum coherence,
and controlled symmetry breaking
Dissertation
von
Frank Deppe
¨Technische Universitat
¨Munchen¨ ¨TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITAT MUNCHEN
Lehrstuhl E23 fu¨r Technische Physik
Walther-Meißner-Institut fu¨r Tieftemperaturforschung
der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften
Superconducting flux quantum circuits:
characterization, quantum coherence,
and controlled symmetry breaking
Frank Deppe
Vollst¨andiger Abdruck der von der Fakult¨at fu¨r Physik der Technischen Universit¨at
Mu¨nchen zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades eines
Doktors der Naturwissenschaften
genehmigten Dissertation.
Vorsitzender: Univ.-Prof. Dr. P. Vogl
Pru¨fer der Dissertation: 1. Univ.-Prof. Dr. R. Gross
2. Hon.-Prof. Dr. G. Rempe
Die Dissertation wurde am 29.12.2008 bei der Technischen Universit¨at Mu¨nchen
eingereicht und durch die Fakult¨at fu¨r Physik am 25.03.2009 angenommen.Half a bee, philosophically,
Must, ipso facto, half not be.
But half the bee has got to be
Vis a vis, its entity. D’you see?
But can a bee be said to be
Or not to be an entire bee
When half the bee is not a bee
Due to some ancient injury?
from: Monty Python, “Eric The Half A Bee”Contents
Contents v
1 Introduction 1
2 Superconducting flux quantum circuits 5
2.1 The Josephson junction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.2 The DC SQUID . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.3 Quantization of charge and flux . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.4 Superconducting qubits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.5 The three-Josephson-junction flux qubit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.6 Bloch vector and Bloch sphere . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2.7 The LC-resonator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2.8 Circuit QED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.9 Spurious fluctuators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
3 Experimental techniques 19
3.1 Capacitance of nanoscale Josephson junctions . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
3.1.1 Capacitance from DC SQUID resonances . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
3.1.2 Ambegaokar-Baratoff relation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
3.1.3 Capacitance from continuous-wave qubit spectroscopy . . . . . 24
3.2 Conventional readout of a flux qubit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
3.2.1 Slow-sweep readout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
3.2.2 Continuous-wave qubit microwave spectroscopy . . . . . . . . 27
3.2.3 Resistive-bias pulsed readout. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
3.2.4 Adiabatic-shift pulse method. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
3.3 Capacitive-bias readout of a flux qubit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
3.4 Qubit operation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3.4.1 Qubit rotations on the Bloch sphere . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3.4.2 The microwave antenna . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
3.4.3 Pulse sequences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
3.4.4 The Phase-cycling method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
3.5 Pulse generation and detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
4 Decoherence of a superconducting flux qubit 41
4.1 Quantum coherence and decoherence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
4.2 Spectroscopy results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
4.3 Coherence properties of the flux qubit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
4.3.1 Energy relaxation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
4.3.2 Dephasing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
vCONTENTS
4.4 Ramsey and spin echo beatings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
4.5 Noise sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
4.6 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
5 Controlled symmetry breaking in circuit QED 63
5.1 Qubit-resonator system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
5.2 Anticrossing under two-photon driving . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
5.3 Upconversion dynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
5.4 Selection rules and symmetry breaking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
5.5 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
6 Summary 73
7 Outlook: Two-resonator circuit QED 75
A Sample fabrication 79
A.1 Josephson junctions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
A.2 DC SQUIDs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
A.3 Flux qubits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
B Cryogenic setup 83
B.1 The dilution refrigerator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
B.2 Slow-sweep qubit spectroscopy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
B.3 Pulsed qubit measurements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
C Multiphoton excitations 89
C.1 Dyson-series approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
C.1.1 The commutator theorem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
C.1.2 Two-photon driving via commutator theorem . . . . . . . . . 90
C.2 Schrieffer-Wolff transformation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
C.3 Bessel expansion in a nonuniformly rotating frame . . . . . . . . . . . 95
C.3.1 Weak-driving regime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
C.3.2 Beyond the weak-driving regime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
D Spectroscopy simulations 103
D.1 Time-trace-averaging method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
D.2 Lindblad approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
Bibliography 105
List of Publications 118
Acknowledgments 120
viChapter 1
Introduction
In recent years, the investigation of superconducting quantum circuits has evolved
into a prospering branch of solid-state physics. Although these systems are macro-
scopic in size – some of them can reach dimensions of up to several millimeters
and are visible to the naked eye – they still exhibit a behavior unique to the world
of quantum mechanics when cooled to millikelvin temperatures. This is a quite
remarkable phenomenon, considering that due to the small but finite value of the
Planck constant, the experimental observability of quantum effects is, at a first
glance, expected only for objects whose size is not significantly larger than that
of natural atoms or small molecules. Consequently, with respect to their electri-
cal properties, conventional solid-state circuits should behave mostly as classical
objects because they consist of a large number of atoms and the current flowing
through them is carried by a large number of electrons. This argument, however,
does not apply to superconducting circuits. Since in the superconducting state all
Cooper pairs can be described by a single macroscopic wave function [1–3], they
show quantum mechanical behavior in a macroscopic degree of freedom (charge or
flux/phase), a feature referred to as macroscopic quantum coherence [4, 5]. In this
way, superconducting quantum circuits can act as artificial atoms on a chip, al-
lowing for the controlled design of experiments addressing fundamental quantum
phenomena. When the two lowest energy levels of such an artificial atom are well
isolated from the higher ones, one obtains a quantum two-level system [6] or qubit.
Qubits are the central elements in the field of quantum information processing [7],
promising significant speedup for certain computational tasks [8–13], an efficient
simulation of large quantum systems [14], and secure quantum communication and
cryptography. In contrast to their natural counterparts, artificial atoms made from
superconducting quantum circuits are tunable to a high degree, both by design and
in-situduringtheexperiments. Furthermore,superconductingquantumcircuitsare,
from the fabrication point of view, easily scalable to larger units. The reason is that
the fabrication process mainly involves state-of-the-art lithographic patterning and
thin-film deposition.
Of critical importance for the construction of solid-state qubits are nonlinear el-
ements. Their existence gives rise to the required anharmonicity in the qubit poten-
tial. In superconducting circuits, superconductor-insulator-superconductor Joseph-
son tunnel junctions [2, 15] constitute by far the most prominent source of nonlin-
earity. Artificial two-level systems based on such tunnel junctions are referred to as
Josephson qubits [16–19]. They can be divided into three major groups, depending
1on the quantum variable governing their dynamics. In charge qubits [20], the quan-
tuminformationis encoded in the presence orabsence ofanexcess Cooperpairona
small superconducting island, which is separated from a reservoir by two Josephson
junctions. Further optimization this original design has lead to the development
of the quantronium [21] and the transmon [22–24]. The conjugate variable of the
charge is the magnetic flux. In flux qubits, persistent currents of opposite sign in a
superconducting loop interrupted by one [25, 2