Observation of a Superradiant Phase Transition with Emergent Cat States.

Superradiant phase transitions (SPTs) are important for understanding light-matter interactions at the quantum level, and play a central role in criticality-enhanced quantum sensing. So far, SPTs have been observed in driven-dissipative systems, but the emergent light fields did not show any nonclassical characteristic due to the presence of strong dissipation. Here we report an experimental demonstration of the SPT featuring the emergence of a highly nonclassical photonic field, realized with a resonator coupled to a superconducting qubit, implementing the quantum Rabi model. We fully characterize the light-matter state by Wigner matrix tomography. The measured matrix elements exhibit quantum interference intrinsic of a photonic mesoscopic superposition, and reveal light-matter entanglement.

Shortcuts to Adiabaticity for the Quantum Rabi Model: Efficient Generation of Giant Entangled Cat States via Parametric Amplification.

We propose a method for the fast generation of nonclassical ground states of the Rabi model in the ultrastrong and deep-strong coupling regimes via the shortcuts-to-adiabatic (STA) dynamics. The time-dependent quantum Rabi model is simulated by applying parametric amplification to the Jaynes-Cummings model. Using experimentally feasible parametric drive, this STA protocol can generate large-size Schrödinger cat states, through a process that is ∼10 times faster compared to adiabatic protocols. Such fast evolution increases the robustness of our protocol against dissipation. Our method enables one to freely design the parametric drive, so that the target state can be generated in the lab frame. A largely detuned light-matter coupling makes the protocol robust against imperfections of the operation times in experiments.

Effective pulse reverse-engineering for strong field-matter interaction.

In this Letter, we propose a scheme to control the evolution of a two-level quantum system in the strong-coupling regime, based on the idea of reverse engineering. A coherent control field is designed to drive the system along a user-predefined evolution trajectory without utilizing the rotating-wave approximation. As concrete examples, we show that complete population inversion, an equally weighted coherent superposition, and even oscillation-like dynamics can be achieved. Since there are no limitations on the coupling strength between the control field and matter, the scheme is attractive for applications such as accelerating desired system dynamics and fast quantum information processing.

Improving the stimulated Raman adiabatic passage via dissipative quantum dynamics.

We propose a method to improve the stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) via dissipative quantum dynamics, taking into account the dephasing effects. Fast and robust population transfer can be obtained with the scheme by the designed pulses and detuning, even though the initial state of the system is imperfect. With a concrete three-level system as an example, the influences of the imperfect initial state, variations in the control parameters, and various dissipation effects are discussed in detail. The numerical simulation shows that the scheme is insensitive to moderate fluctuations of experimental parameters and the relatively large dissipation effects of the excited state. Furthermore, the dominant dissipative factors, namely, the dephasing effects of the ground states and the imperfect initial state are no longer undesirable, in fact, they are the important resources to the scheme. Therefore, the scheme could provide more choices for the realization of the complete population transfer in the strong dissipative fields where the standard stimulated Raman adiabatic passage or shortcut schemes are invalid.

Fast generation of three-qubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state based on the Lewis-Riesenfeld invariants in coupled cavities.

In this paper, we propose an efficient scheme to fast generate three-qubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state by constructing shortcuts to adiabatic passage (STAP) based on the "Lewis-Riesenfeld (LR) invariants" in spatially separated cavities connected by optical fibers. Numerical simulations illustrate that the scheme is not only fast, but robust against the decoherence caused by atomic spontaneous emission, cavity losses and the fiber photon leakages. This might be useful to realize fast and noise-resistant quantum information processing for multi-qubit systems.

Fast generation of three-atom singlet state by transitionless quantum driving.

Motivated by "transitionless quantum driving", we construct shortcuts to adiabatic passage in a three-atom system to create a singlet state with the help of quantum zeno dynamics and non-resonant lasers. The influence of various decoherence processes is discussed by numerical simulation and the results reveal that the scheme is fast and robust against decoherence and operational imperfection. We also investigate how to select the experimental parameters to control the cavity dissipation and atomic spontaneous emission which will have an application value in experiment.

Reverse engineering of a Hamiltonian by designing the evolution operators.

We propose an effective and flexible scheme for reverse engineering of a Hamiltonian by designing the evolution operators to eliminate the terms of Hamiltonian which are hard to be realized in practice. Different from transitionless quantum driving (TQD), the present scheme is focus on only one or parts of moving states in a D-dimension (D ≥ 3) system. The numerical simulation shows that the present scheme not only contains the results of TQD, but also has more free parameters, which make this scheme more flexible. An example is given by using this scheme to realize the population transfer for a Rydberg atom. The influences of various decoherence processes are discussed by numerical simulation and the result shows that the scheme is fast and robust against the decoherence and operational imperfection. Therefore, this scheme may be used to construct a Hamiltonian which can be realized in experiments.

Arbitrary quantum state engineering in three-state systems via Counterdiabatic driving.

A scheme for arbitrary quantum state engineering (QSE) in three-state systems is proposed. Firstly, starting from a set of complete orthogonal time-dependent basis with undetermined coefficients, a time-dependent Hamiltonian is derived via Counterdiabatic driving for the purpose of guiding the system to attain an arbitrary target state at a predefined time. Then, on request of the assumed target states, two single-mode driving protocols and a multi-mode driving protocol are proposed as examples to discuss the validity of the QSE scheme. The result of comparison between single-mode driving and multi-mode driving shows that multi-mode driving seems to have a wider rang of application prospect because it can drive the system to an arbitrary target state from an arbitrary initial state also at a predefined time even without the use of microwave fields for the transition between the two ground states. Moreover, for the purpose of discussion in the scheme's feasibility in practice, a polynomial ansatz as the simplest exampleis used to fix the pulses. The result shows that the pulses designed to implement the protocols are not hard to be realized in practice. At the end, QSE in higher-dimensional systems is also discussed in brief as a generalization example of the scheme.

Fast generation of W states of superconducting qubits with multiple Schrödinger dynamics.

In this paper, we present a protocol to generate a W state of three superconducting qubits (SQs) by using multiple Schrödinger dynamics. The three SQs are respective embedded in three different coplanar waveguide resonators (CPWRs), which are coupled to a superconducting coupler (SCC) qubit at the center of the setups. With the multiple Schrödinger dynamics, we build a shortcuts to adiabaticity (STA), which greatly accelerates the evolution of the system. The Rabi frequencies of the laser pulses being designed can be expressed by the superpositions of Gaussian functions via the curves fitting, so that they can be realized easily in experiments. What is more, numerical simulation result shows that the protocol is robust against control parameters variations and decoherence mechanisms, such as the dissipations from the CPWRs and the energy relaxation. In addition, the influences of the dephasing are also resisted on account of the accelerating for the dynamics. Thus, the performance of the protocol is much better than that with the conventional adiabatic passage techniques when the dephasing is taken into account. We hope the protocol could be implemented easily in experiments with current technology.

Shortcuts to adiabatic passage for fast generation of Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states by transitionless quantum driving.

Berry's approach on "transitionless quantum driving" shows how to set a Hamiltonian which drives the dynamics of a system along instantaneous eigenstates of a reference Hamiltonian to reproduce the same final result of an adiabatic process in a shorter time. In this paper, motivated by transitionless quantum driving, we construct shortcuts to adiabatic passage in a three-atom system to create the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states with the help of quantum Zeno dynamics and of non-resonant lasers. The influence of various decoherence processes is discussed by numerical simulation and the result proves that the scheme is fast and robust against decoherence and operational imperfection.