Engineered dissipation using symmetry-protected superconducting circuits

ended

Dissipation is fundamental to physical systems. In quantum mechanics, this manifests itself as energy decay and dephasing also known as quantum decoherence. In the field of quantum computing, decoherence is often relegated as a non-ideality of the physical system. However, dissipation and decoherence are a necessary for quantum information processing; allowing measurement, state preparation, and quantum error correction. I propose to explore engineered multi-photon dissipation processes using superconducting circuits. By extending the well-established ‘transmon qubit’ platform, this work will investigate the use of symmetry to prevent single-photon decay while allowing two-photon and four-photon decay events. Such a mechanism has immediate applications akin to trapped-ion technology for qubit state reset and resonance fluorescence readout. In addition, possible multi-mode dissipative processes provide a rich physics to explore more complex quantum phenomena in larger systems. This includes entanglement stabilization and the generation of decoherence-free subspaces.