Publications from 2021

Artificial magnetic molecules can contribute to progressing toward large scale quantum computation by (a) integrating multiple quantum resources and (b) reducing the computational costs of some applications. Chemical design, guided by theoretical proposals, allows embedding nontrivial quantum functionalities in each molecular unit, which then acts as a microscopic quantum processor able to encode error protected logical qubits or to implement quantum simulations. Scaling up even further requires “wiring-up” multiple molecules. We discuss how to achieve this goal by the coupling to on-chip superconducting resonators. The potential advantages of this hybrid approach and the challenges that still lay ahead are critically reviewed.

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) schemes can be applied to micron-, and nanometer-sized samples by the aid of quantum sensors such as nitrogen vacancy (NV) color centers in diamond. These minute devices allow for magnetometry of nuclear spin ensembles with high spatial and frequency resolution at ambient conditions, thus having a clear impact in different areas such as chemistry, biology, medicine, and material sciences. In practice, NV quantum sensors are driven by microwave (MW) control fields with a twofold objective: On the one hand, MW fields bridge the energy gap between NV and nearby nuclei which enables a coherent and selective coupling among them while, on the other hand, MW fields remove environmental noise on the NV leading to enhanced interrogation time. In this work we review distinct MW radiation patterns, or dynamical decoupling techniques, for nanoscale NMR applications.

Using quantum systems to efficiently solve quantum chemistry problems is one of the long-sought applications of near-future quantum technologies. In a recent work [J. Argüello-Luengo et al., Nature (London) 574, 215 (2019)], ultracold fermionic atoms have been proposed for this purpose by showing us how to simulate in an analog way the quantum chemistry Hamiltonian projected in a lattice basis set. Here, we continue exploring this path and go beyond these results in several ways. First, we numerically benchmark the working conditions of the analog simulator and find less demanding experimental setups where chemistry-like behavior in three dimensions can still be observed. We also provide a deeper understanding of the errors of the simulation appearing due to discretization and finite-size effects and provide a way to mitigate them. Finally, we benchmark the simulator characterizing the behavior of two-electron atoms (He) and molecules (

Coherent photon-emitter interfaces offer a way to mediate efficient nonlinear photon-photon interactions, much needed for quantum information processing. Here we experimentally study the case of a two-level emitter, a quantum dot, coupled to a single optical mode in a nanophotonic waveguide. We carry out few-photon transport experiments and record the statistics of the light to reconstruct the scattering matrix elements of one- and two-photon components. This provides direct insight to the complex nonlinear photon interaction that contains rich many-body physics.

Frequency-resolved photon correlations have proven to be a useful resource to unveil nonlinearities hidden in standard observables such as the spectrum or the standard (color-blind) photon correlations. In this manuscript, we analyze the frequency-resolved correlations of the photons being emitted from an optomechanical system where light is nonlinearly coupled to the quantized motion of a mechanical mode of a resonator, but where the quantum nonlinear response is typically hard to evidence. We present and unravel a rich landscape of frequency-resolved correlations, and discuss how the time-delayed correlations can reveal information about the dynamics of the system. We also study the dependence of correlations on relevant parameters such as the single-photon coupling strength, the filtering linewidth, or the thermal noise in the environment. This enriched understanding of the system can trigger new experiments to probe nonlinear phenomena in optomechanics, and provide insights into dynamics of generic nonlinear systems.

Weyl photons appear when two three-dimensional photonic bands with linear dispersion are degenerate at a single momentum point, labeled as Weyl point. These points have remarkable properties such as being robust topological monopoles of Berry curvature as well as an associated vanishing density of states. In this work, we report on a systematic theoretical study of the quantum optical consequences of such Weyl photons. First, we analyze the dynamics of a single quantum emitter coupled to a Weyl photonic bath as a function of its detuning with respect to the Weyl point and study the corrresponding emission patterns, using both perturbative and exact treatments. Our calculations show an asymmetric dynamical behavior when the emitter is detuned away from the Weyl frequency, as well as different regimes of highly collimated emission, which ultimately translate in a variety of directional collective decays. Besides, we find that the incorporation of staggered mass and hopping terms in the bath Hamiltonian both enriches the observed phenomenology and increases the tunability of the interaction. Finally, we analyze the competition between the coherent and dissipative components of the dynamics for the case of two emitters and derive the conditions under which an effective interacting spin model description is valid.

Dirac energy dispersions are responsible for the extraordinary transport properties of graphene. This motivated the quest for engineering such energy dispersions also in photonics, where they have been predicted to lead to many exciting phenomena. One paradigmatic example is the possibility of obtaining power-law, decoherence-free, photon-mediated interactions between quantum emitters when they interact with such photonic baths. This prediction, however, has been obtained either by using toy-model baths, which neglect polarization effects, or by restricting the emitter position to high-symmetry points of the unit cell in the case of realistic structures. Here, we develop a semianalytical theory of dipole radiation near photonic Dirac points in realistic structures that allows us to compute the effective photon-mediated interactions along the whole unit cell. Using this theory, we are able to find the positions that maximize the emitter interactions and their range, finding a trade-off between them. Besides, using the polarization degree of freedom, we also find positions where the nature of the collective interactions changes from being coherent to dissipative ones. Thus, our results significantly improve the knowledge of Dirac light–matter interfaces and can serve as a guidance for future experimental designs.

One of the most striking predictions of quantum electrodynamics is that vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field can lead to spontaneous emission of atoms as well as photon-mediated interactions among them. Since these processes strongly depend on the nature of the photonic bath, a current burgeoning field is the study of their modification in the presence of photons with non-trivial energy dispersions, e.g. the ones confined in photonic crystals. A remarkable example is the case of isotropic Dirac-photons, which has been recently shown to lead to non-exponential spontaneous emission as well as dissipation-less long-range emitter interactions. In this work, we show how to further tune these processes by considering anisotropic Dirac cone dispersions, which include tilted, semi-Dirac, and the recently discovered type II and III Dirac points. In particular, we show how by changing the anisotropy of the lattice one can change both the spatial shape of the interactions as well as its coherent/incoherent nature. Finally, we theoretically analyze a possible implementation based on subwavelength atomic arrays where these energy dispersions can be engineered and interfaced with quantum emitters.

Quantum emitters interacting with photonic band-gap materials lead to the appearance of qubit-photon bound states that mediate decoherence-free, tunable emitter-emitter interactions. Recently, it has been shown that when these band gaps have a topological origin, like in the photonic Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model, these qubit-photon bound states feature chiral shapes and certain robustness to disorder. In this paper, we consider a more general situation where the emitters interact with an extended SSH photonic model with longer-range hoppings that displays a richer phase diagram than its nearest-neighbor counterpart, e.g., phases with larger winding numbers. In particular, we first study the features of the qubit-photon bound states when the emitters couple to the bulk modes in the different phases, discern their connection with the topological invariant, and show how to further tune their shape through the use of giant atoms, i.e., nonlocal couplings. Then, we consider the coupling of emitters to the edge modes appearing in the different topological phases. Here, we show that giant-atom dynamics can distinguish between all different topological phases, in contrast to the case with local couplings. Finally, we provide a possible experimental implementation of the model based on periodic modulations of circuit QED systems. Our paper enriches the understanding of the interplay between topological photonics and quantum optics.

In this work, we develop a variational quantum algorithm to solve partial differential equations (PDE’s) using a space-efficient variational ansatz that merges structured quantum circuits for coarse-graining with Fourier-based interpolation. We implement variational circuits to represent symmetrical smooth functions as the ansatz and combine them with classical optimizers that differ on the gradient calculation: no gradient, numerical gradient and analytic gradient. We apply this method to the computation of the ground state of the one-dimensional quantum harmonic oscillator and the transmon qubit. In idealized quantum computers, we show that the harmonic oscillator can be solved with an infidelity of order 10^{−5} with 3 qubits and the transmon qubit with an error of order 10^{−4} with 4 qubits. We find that these fidelities can be approached in real noisy quantum computers, either directly or through error mitigation techniques. However, we also find that the precision in the estimate of the eigenvalues is still sub-par with other classical methods, suggesting the need for better strategies in the optimization and the evaluation of the cost function itself.

We analyze the coupling of two flux qubits with a general many-body projector into the low-energy subspace. Specifically, we extract the effective Hamiltonians that controls the dynamics of two qubits when they are coupled via a capacitor and/or via a Josephson junction. While the capacitor induces a static charge coupling tunable by design, the Josephson junction produces a magnetic-like interaction easily tunable by replacing the junction with a superconducting quantum interference device. Those two elements allow to engineer qubits Hamiltonians with XX, YY, and ZZ interactions, including ultrastrongly coupled ones. We present an exhaustive numerical study for two three-Josephson junctions flux qubit that can be directly used in experimental work. The method developed here, namely, the numerical tool to extract qubit effective Hamiltonians at strong coupling, can be applied to replicate our analysis for general systems of many qubits and any type of coupling.

We present a topological approach to the input-output relations of photonic driven-dissipative systems acting as directional amplifiers. Our theory relies on a mapping from the optical non-Hermitian coupling matrix to an effective topological insulator Hamiltonian. This mapping is based on the singular value decomposition of non-Hermitian coupling matrices, the inverse matrix of which determines the linear input-output response of the system. In topologically nontrivial regimes, the input-output response of the lattice is dominated by singular vectors with zero singular values that are the equivalent of zero energy states in topological insulators, leading to directional amplification of a coherent input signal. In such topological amplification regime, our theoretical framework allows us to fully characterize the amplification properties of the quantum device such as gain, bandwidth, added noise, and noise-to-signal ratio. We exemplify our ideas in a one-dimensional nonreciprocal photonic lattice, for which we derive fully analytical predictions. We show that the directional amplification is near quantum limited with a gain growing exponentially with system size N, while the noise-to-signal ratio is suppressed as sqrt(N). This suggests interesting applications of our theory for quantum signal amplification and single-photon detection.

Quantum sensors typically translate external fields into a periodic response whose frequency is then determined by analyses performed in Fourier space. This allows for a linear inference of the parameters that characterize external signals. In practice, however, quantum sensors are able to detect fields only in a narrow range of amplitudes and frequencies. A departure from this range, as well as the presence of significant noise sources and short detection times, lead to a loss of the linear relationship between the response of the sensor and the target field, thus limiting the working regime of the sensor. Here we address these challenges by means of a Bayesian inference approach that is tolerant to strong deviations from desired periodic responses of the sensor and is able to provide reliable estimates even with a very limited number of measurements. We demonstrate our method for an 171Yb+ trapped-ion quantum sensor but stress the general applicability of this approach to different systems.

We examine how the presence of an excited state quantum phase transition manifests in the dynamics of a many-body system subject to a sudden quench. Focusing on the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model initialized in the ground state of the ferromagnetic phase, we demonstrate that the work probability distribution displays non-Gaussian behavior for quenches in the vicinity of the excited state critical point. Furthermore, we show that the entropy of the diagonal ensemble is highly susceptible to critical regions, making it a robust and practical indicator of the associated spectral characteristics. We assess the role that symmetry breaking has on the ensuing dynamics, highlighting that its effect is only present for quenches beyond the critical point. Finally, we show that similar features persist when the system is initialized in an excited state and briefly explore the behavior for initial states in the paramagnetic phase.