F. F. Su | Searcharxiv

arXiv2022

Probing Operator Spreading via Floquet Engineering in a Superconducting Circuit

Operator spreading, often characterized by out-of-time-order correlators (OTOCs), is one of the central concepts in quantum many-body physics. However, measuring OTOCs is experimentally challenging due to the requirement of reversing the time evolution of systems. Here we apply Floquet engineering to investigate operator spreading in a superconducting 10-qubit chain. Floquet engineering provides an effective way to tune the coupling strength between nearby qubits, which is used to demonstrate quantum walks with tunable couplings, reversed time evolution, and the measurement of OTOCs. A clear light-cone-like operator propagation is observed in the system with multiple excitations, and has a nearly equal velocity as the single-particle quantum walk. For the butterfly operator that is nonlocal (local) under the Jordan-Wigner transformation, the OTOCs show distinct behaviors with (without) a signature of information scrambling in the near integrable system.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2015

Coherent population transfer between weakly-coupled states in a ladder-type superconducting qutrit

Stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) offers significant advantages for coherent population transfer between un- or weakly-coupled states and has the potential of realizing efficient quantum gate, qubit entanglement, and quantum information transfer. Here we report on the realization of STIRAP in a superconducting phase qutrit - a ladder-type system in which the ground state population is coherently transferred to the second-excited state via the dark state subspace. The result agrees well with the numerical simulation of the master equation, which further demonstrates that with the state-of-the-art superconducting qutrits the transfer efficiency readily exceeds $99\%$ while keeping the population in the first-excited state below $1\%$. We show that population transfer via STIRAP is significantly more robust against variations of the experimental parameters compared to that via the conventional resonant $π$ pulse method. Our work opens up a new venue for exploring STIRAP for quantum information processing using the superconducting artificial atoms.

quant-ph↗