Heisenberg-Limited Spin Squeezing via Bosonic Parametric Driving.

Spin-spin interactions generated by a detuned cavity are a standard mechanism for generating highly entangled spin squeezed states. We show here how introducing a weak detuned parametric (two-photon) drive on the cavity provides a powerful means for controlling the form of the induced interactions. Without a drive, the induced interactions cannot generate Heisenberg-limited spin squeezing, but a weak optimized drive gives rise to an ideal two-axis twist interaction and Heisenberg-limited squeezing. Parametric driving is also advantageous in regimes limited by dissipation, and enables an alternate adiabatic scheme which can prepare optimally squeezed, Dicke-like states. Our scheme is compatible with a number of platforms, including solid-state systems where spin ensembles are coupled to superconducting quantum circuits or mechanical modes.

Bootstrapping quantum process tomography via a perturbative ansatz.

Quantum process tomography has become increasingly critical as the need grows for robust verification and validation of candidate quantum processors, since it plays a key role in both performance assessment and debugging. However, as these processors grow in size, standard process tomography becomes an almost impossible task. Here, we present an approach for efficient quantum process tomography that uses a physically motivated ansatz for an unknown quantum process. Our ansatz bootstraps to an effective description for an unknown process on a multi-qubit processor from pairwise two-qubit tomographic data. Further, our approach can inherit insensitivity to system preparation and measurement error from the two-qubit tomography scheme. We benchmark our approach using numerical simulation of noisy three-qubit gates, and show that it produces highly accurate characterizations of quantum processes. Further, we demonstrate our approach experimentally on a superconducting quantum processor, building three-qubit gate reconstructions from two-qubit tomographic data.

Enhancing Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics via Antisqueezing: Synthetic Ultrastrong Coupling.

We present and analyze a method where parametric (two-photon) driving of a cavity is used to exponentially enhance the light-matter coupling in a generic cavity QED setup, with time-dependent control. Our method allows one to enhance weak-coupling systems, such that they enter the strong coupling regime (where the coupling exceeds dissipative rates) and even the ultrastrong coupling regime (where the coupling is comparable to the cavity frequency). As an example, we show how the scheme allows one to use a weak-coupling system to adiabatically prepare the highly entangled ground state of the ultrastrong coupling system. The resulting state could be used for remote entanglement applications.

Stroboscopic Qubit Measurement with Squeezed Illumination.

Microwave squeezing represents the ultimate sensitivity frontier for superconducting qubit measurement. However, measurement enhancement has remained elusive, in part because integration with standard dispersive readout pollutes the signal channel with antisqueezed noise. Here we induce a stroboscopic light-matter coupling with superior squeezing compatibility, and observe an increase in the final signal-to-noise ratio of 24%. Squeezing the orthogonal phase slows measurement-induced dephasing by a factor of 1.8. This scheme provides a means to the practical application of squeezing for qubit measurement.