Abstract

A revolution is underway in the construction of ‘artificial atoms’ out of superconducting electrical circuits. ‘Circuit QED’ permits strong-coupling non-linear optics at the single-photon level and gives an architecture for novel quantum information processing. The dispersive coupling between a qubit and a microwave cavity can be orders of magnitude larger than the line widths of both qubit and cavity. This yields a new ‘quantum toolbox’ which permits arbitrary control of the entangled quantum state of the system. For example one can flip the state of the qubit conditioned on there being exactly n photons in the cavity or one can displace the cavity oscillation amplitude conditioned on the state of the qubit. Using these tools it is now possible to create large ‘Schrödinger cat’ states containing more than 100 photons. An introduction to circuit QED and a review of recent experimental results will be presented.

© 2013 Optical Society of America