Quantum Metamaterial for Broadband Detection of Single Microwave Photons
PHYSICAL REVIEW APPLIED 15, 034074 (2021) Quantum Metamaterial for Broadband Detection of Single Microwave Photons Arne L. Grimsmo ,1,2,* Baptiste Royer ,1,3 John Mark Kreikebaum,4,5 Yufeng Ye,6,7 Kevin O’Brien,6,7 Irfan Siddiqi,4,5,8 and Alexandre Blais 1,9 1 Institut quantique and Départment de Physique, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Québec J1K 2R1, Canada 2 Centre for Engineered Quantum Systems, School of Physics, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia 3 Department of Physics, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520, USA 4 Materials Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA 5 Quantum Nanoelectronics Laboratory, Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA 6 Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA 7 Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA 8 Computational Research Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA 9 Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Toronto, Canada (Received 14 July 2020; revised 27 January 2021; accepted 1 February 2021; published 25 March 2021) Detecting traveling photons is an essential primitive for many quantum-information processing tasks. We introduce a single-photon detector design operating in the microwave domain, based on a weakly nonlinear metamaterial where the nonlinearity is provided by a large number of Josephson junctions. The combination of weak nonlinearity and large spatial extent circumvents well-known obstacles limiting approaches based on a localized Kerr medium. Using numerical many-body simulations we show that the single-photon detection fidelity increases with the length of the metamaterial to approach one at experi- mentally realistic lengths.
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