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  • Open Access

Quantum Simulation of the Ultrastrong-Coupling Dynamics in Circuit Quantum Electrodynamics

D. Ballester1, G. Romero1, J. J. García-Ripoll2, F. Deppe3,4, and E. Solano1,5

  • 1Departamento de Química Física, Universidad del País Vasco UPV/EHU, Apartado 644, 48080 Bilbao, Spain
  • 2Instituto de Física Fundamental, CSIC, Serrano 113-bis, 28006 Madrid, Spain
  • 3Walther-Meißner-Institut, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, D-85748 Garching, Germany
  • 4Physik-Department, Technische Universität München, D-85748 Garching, Germany
  • 5IKERBASQUE, Basque Foundation for Science, Alameda Urquijo 36, 48011 Bilbao, Spain

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Phys. Rev. X 2, 021007 – Published 16 May, 2012

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.2.021007

Abstract

We propose a method to get experimental access to the physics of the ultrastrong- and deep-strong-coupling regimes of light-matter interaction through the quantum simulation of their dynamics in standard circuit QED. The method makes use of a two-tone driving scheme, using state-of-the-art circuit-QED technology, and can be easily extended to general cavity-QED setups. We provide examples of ultrastrong- and deep-strong-coupling quantum effects that would be otherwise inaccessible.

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Popular Summary

Circuit quantum electrodynamics (circuit QED) has recently emerged as a promising direction for solid-state based quantum computation. Using an on-chip structural platform, where an artificial photon-emitting atom, such as a superconducting qubit, is coupled to a one-dimensional electromagnetic-wave resonator, circuit QED creates and exploits coherent matter-light coupling between the qubit and the electromagnetic modes. Understanding comprehensively how the qubit interacts with the resonator and using that understanding to manipulate the qubit or the electromagnetic field of the resonator would constitute a major advance in this field. As nature would have it, however, the stronger the qubit-resonator coupling and the more interesting the underlying physics are, the more difficult it is to unravel the physics. What we propose in this paper is an indirect approach to circumvent the difficulty: to simulate an important circuit-QED model in the hard-to-access and hard-to-control regimes of very strong light-matter coupling, with another purposefully designed qubit-resonator system working in an easily accessible regime of weaker coupling.

The analogue system starts with a superconducting qubit coupled to the electric field of the single mode of the resonator in the strong-coupling regime. Our essential idea is to drive the qubit with two classical (i.e., unquantized) electromagnetic fields that are orthogonal to the axis of the one-dimensional resonator and are of different frequencies and strengths. This idea comes from the realization that a nontrivial mathematical transformation exists between the model describing this driven system and the original circuit-QED model. Remarkably, by tuning the frequencies and the amplitudes of the two driving fields, we can simulate the behavior of the original model across the full range of the qubit-resonator coupling with that of the driven analogue systems where the qubit-resonator coupling is only moderately strong. In particular, through numerical simulations of the analogue system we have verified the presence of photons in the ground state—a distinct property of the regime of ultrastrong light-matter interaction. Last, but not least, this proposal also allows us to simulate gedanken experiments in relativistic quantum mechanics.

Our proposed approach thus opens a path toward an ultimate understanding of physics in a broad range of regimes of light-matter coupling that are inaccessible in standard quantum optics by use of a quantum simulator.

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Phys. Rev. X 2, 021007– Published 16 May, 2012
  • Received 9 August 2011
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This article is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

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