Preparation of a superposition of squeezed coherent states of a cavity field via coupling to a superconducting charge qubit

Abstract

The generation of nonclassical states of a radiation field has become increasingly important in the past years given its various applications in quantum communication. The feasibility of generating such nonclassical states has been established in several branches of physics such as cavity electrodynamics, trapped ions, quantum dots, atoms inside cavities and so on. In this sense, we will discuss the issue of the generation of nonclassical states in the context of a superconducting qubit in a microcavity. It has been recently proposed a way to engineer quantum states using a SQUID charge qubit inside a cavity with a controllable interaction between the cavity field and the charge qubit. The key ingredients to engineer these quantum states are a tunable gate voltage and a classical magnetic field applied to SQUID. Some models including these ingredients and using some appropriate approximations which allow for the linearization of the interaction and nonclassical states of the field were generated. Since decoherence is known to affect quantum effects uninterruptedly and decoherence process are works even when the quantum state is being formed, therefore, it is interesting to envisage processes through which quantum superpositions are generated as fast as possible. The decoherence effect has been studied and quantified in the context of cavity QED where it is shown that the more quantum is the superposition, more rapidly the environmental effects occur during the process of creating the quantum state. In the latter reference, we have succeeded in linearizing the Hamiltonian through the application of an appropriate unitary transformation and for certain values of the parameters involved, we have showed that it is possible to obtain specific Hamiltonians. In this work we will use such approach for preparing superposition of two squeezed coherent states.