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With modern experimental techniques, electric circuits are measurable in the physical circumstances, where direct quantum mechanical phenomena are observable. The physical understanding requires introduction of pure quantum concepts, principles and laws. A concrete physical example is a Cooper-pair-box, which is a superconducting island isolated from the larger superconducting loop by two thin isolating layers. By connecting the island with an inductor-capacitor oscillator (see figure below), quantum phenomena can be observed at very low temperatures (T=30-40 mK). With a proper choice of control and manufacturing parameters, the Cooper-pair-box forms an effective quantum two-level system also know as a quantum bit or a qubit. One of the elementary building blocks of the proposed quantum computer is a register of qubits.
Figure: A Cooper-pair-box (the section in between the Josephson junctions denoted with crosses) coupled to the inductor (L)-capacitor(C) oscillator and measured by recording the reflection of the probe signal.

Quantum optics studies the interaction of light with matter at the elementary level. In electric circuit analogues, the LC-oscillator models the monochromatic photon field and the atom is build from the Cooper-pair-box in which discrete energy levels are formed analogous to real atoms and molecules. The main advantage of the new approach is that it pushes the traditional quantum optics in unexplored parameter and phenomena realms, an example is shown in Ref. [1]. My research attention is focused on methods to solve time-dependent quantum mechanical problems, specially using quantum trajectories or Floquet method.

Quantum trajectories

The master equation models the dynamics of open quantum systems and is thus one of the fundamental conceptual tools in quantum optics. On the one hand, quantum trajectory approach is only an efficient computational method to solve the master equation, but on the other hand it opens an alternative point of view to quantum dynamics. Quantum trajectory follows the time-development of a single measurement run instead of averages or expectation values (see, for example, Refs. [2] and [3] for more details about quantum trajectories in circuit QED). I have applied the quantum trajectory simulation procedure to study the motional averaging phenomena [4, 5] in superconducting electric circuits.

Figure: Quantum trajectories for a driven qubit embedded in environment with non-zero temperature; (left) A quantum trajectory showing abrupt quantum jumps in the polarization of the qubit; (right) The polarization of the qubit averaged over 1000 trajectories (red) compared with the analytical solution (green).

Floquet method

In general, time-dependent quantum mechanical problems are hard or impossible to solve analytically, i.e. without resorting to various numerical methods. If the system turns up to be periodic in time, one can use the so-called Floquet method [6] to solve the time-dependent problem like it were time-independent. By using the Floquet method all the results and methods developed in time-independent quantum mechanics are applicable to time-periodic problems. As an application, we have shown that a strongly driven and weakly probed qubit can be analyzed and understood very accurately by using Fermi's golden rule in the Floquet space [7, 8].
Figure: Application of the Floquet method to a strongly driven and weakly probed qubit [6]: (left) The quasienergy landscape; (centre) The energy flow from resonator to qubit calculated by using Fermi's golden in the Floquet space; (right) The measured reflection coefficient.

References

[1] L. V. Bishop, J. M. Chow, J. Koch, A. A. Houck, M. H. Devoret, E. Thuneberg, S. M. Girvin, R. J. Schoelkopf, Nonlinear response of the vacuum Rabi resonance, Nature Physics 5, 105 (2009).

[2] J. Gambetta, A. Blais, M. Boissonneault, A. A. Houck, D. I. Schuster, S. M. Girvin, Quantum trajectory approach to circuit QED: Quantum jumps and the Zeno effect, Physical Review A 77, 012112 (2008).

[3] R. Vijay, D. H. Slichter, I. Siddiqi, Observation of quantum jumps in a superconducting artificial atom, Physical Review Letters 106, 110502 (2011).

[4] M. Silveri, M. Sc. Thesis, Motional averaging in a qubit and a harmonic oscillator, University of Oulu, 2009.

[5] Jian Li, M. P. Silveri, K. S. Kumar, J.-M. Pirkkalainen, A.  Vepsäläinen, W. C. Chien, J. Tuorila, M. A. Sillanpää, P. J. Hakonen, E. Thuneberg, and G. S. Paraoanu, Motional averaging in a superconducting qubit, Nature Communications 4, 1420 (2013).

[6] J. H. Shirley, Solution of the Schrödinger equation with a Hamiltonian periodic in time, Physical Review 138, B 979 (1965).

[7] J. Tuorila, M. Silveri, M. Sillanpää, Y. Makhlin, E. Thuneberg and P. Hakonen, Stark effect and generalized Bloch-Siegert shift in a strongly driven two-level system, Physical Review Letters 105, 257003 (2010).

[8] Matti Silveri, Jani Tuorila, Mika Kemppainen, and Erkki Thuneberg, Probe spectroscopy of quasienergy states, Physical Review B 87, 134505 (2013).

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