Yuimaru Kubo

Quantum technologies with hybrid systems

An extensively pursued current direction of research in physics aims at the development of practical technologies that exploit the effects of quantum mechanics. As part of this ongoing effort, devices for quantum information processing, secure communication, and high-precision sensing are being implemented with diverse systems, ranging from photons, atoms, and spins to mesoscopic superconducting and nanomechanical structures. Their physical properties make some of these systems better suited than others for specific tasks; thus, photons are well suited for transmitting quantum information, weakly interacting spins can serve as long-lived quantum memories, and superconducting elements can rapidly process information encoded in their quantum states. A central goal of the envisaged quantum technologies is to develop devices that can simultaneously perform several of these tasks, namely, reliably store, process, and transmit quantum information. Hybrid quantum systems composed of different physical components with complementary functionalities may provide precisely such multitasking capabilities. This article reviews some of the driving theoretical ideas and first experimental realizations of hybrid quantum systems and the opportunities and challenges they present and offers a glance at the near- and long-term perspectives of this fascinating and rapidly expanding field.

Reaching the quantum limit of sensitivity in electron spin resonance

The detection and characterization of paramagnetic species by electron spin resonance (ESR) spectroscopy is widely used throughout chemistry, biology and materials science, from in vivo imaging to distance measurements in spin-labelled proteins. ESR relies on the inductive detection of microwave signals emitted by the spins into a coupled microwave resonator during their Larmor precession. However, such signals can be very small, prohibiting the application of ESR at the nanoscale (for example, at the single-cell level or on individual nanoparticles). Here, using a Josephson parametric microwave amplifier combined with high-quality-factor superconducting microresonators cooled at millikelvin temperatures, we improve the state-of-the-art sensitivity of inductive ESR detection by nearly four orders of magnitude. We demonstrate the detection of 1,700 bismuth donor spins in silicon within a single Hahn echo with unit signal-to-noise ratio, reduced to 150 spins by averaging a single Carr-Purcell-Meiboom-Gill sequence. This unprecedented sensitivity reaches the limit set by quantum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field instead of thermal or technical noise, which constitutes a novel regime for magnetic resonance. The detection volume of our resonator is ∼ 0.02 nl, and our approach can be readily scaled down further to improve sensitivity, providing a new versatile toolbox for ESR at the nanoscale.

Flux qubits with long coherence times for hybrid quantum circuits.

We present measurements of superconducting flux qubits embedded in a three dimensional copper cavity. The qubits are fabricated on a sapphire substrate and are measured by coupling them inductively to an on-chip superconducting resonator located in the middle of the cavity. At their flux-insensitive point, all measured qubits reach an intrinsic energy relaxation time in the 6-20  μs range and a pure dephasing time comprised between 3 and 10  μs. This significant improvement over previous works opens the way to the coherent coupling of a flux qubit to individual spins.

Controlling spin relaxation with a cavity

Spontaneous emission of radiation is one of the fundamental mechanisms by which an excited quantum system returns to equilibrium. For spins, however, spontaneous emission is generally negligible compared to other non-radiative relaxation processes because of the weak coupling between the magnetic dipole and the electromagnetic field. In 1946, Purcell realized that the rate of spontaneous emission can be greatly enhanced by placing the quantum system in a resonant cavity. This effect has since been used extensively to control the lifetime of atoms and semiconducting heterostructures coupled to microwave or optical cavities, and is essential for the realization of high-efficiency single-photon sources. Here we report the application of this idea to spins in solids. By coupling donor spins in silicon to a superconducting microwave cavity with a high quality factor and a small mode volume, we reach the regime in which spontaneous emission constitutes the dominant mechanism of spin relaxation. The relaxation rate is increased by three orders of magnitude as the spins are tuned to the cavity resonance, demonstrating that energy relaxation can be controlled on demand. Our results provide a general way to initialize spin systems into their ground state and therefore have applications in magnetic resonance and quantum information processing. They also demonstrate that the coupling between the magnetic dipole of a spin and the electromagnetic field can be enhanced up to the point at which quantum fluctuations have a marked effect on the spin dynamics; as such, they represent an important step towards the coherent magnetic coupling of individual spins to microwave photons.

Storage and retrieval of a microwave field in a spin ensemble

We report the storage and retrieval of a small microwave field from a superconducting resonator into collective excitations of a spin ensemble. The spins are nitrogen-vacancy centers in a diamond crystal. The storage time of the order of 30 ns is limited by inhomogeneous broadening of the spin ensemble.

Electron spin resonance detected by a superconducting qubit

A new method for detecting the magnetic resonance of electronic spins at low temperature is demonstrated. It consists in measuring the signal emitted by the spins with a superconducting qubit that acts as a single- microwave-photon detector, resulting in an enhanced sensitivity. We implement such an electron-spin resonance spectrometer using a hybrid quantum circuit in which a transmon qubit is coupled to a spin ensemble consisting of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond. With this setup we measure the NV center absorption spectrum at 30 mK at an excitation level of ∼ 15 μB out of an ensemble of 1011 spins.

Proposal for detecting a single electron spin in a microwave resonator

We propose a method for detecting the presence of a single spin in a crystal by coupling it to a high-quality factor superconducting planar resonator. By confining the microwave field in the vicinity of a constriction of nanometric dimensions, the coupling constant can be as high as 5–10 kHz. This coupling affects the amplitude of the field reflected by the resonator and the integrated homodyne signal allows detection of a single spin with unit signal-to-noise ratio within few milliseconds. We further show that a stochastic master equation approach and a Bayesian analysis of the full time-dependent homodyne signal improves this figure by ∼30% for typical parameters.

Storage and retrieval of microwave fields at the single-photon level in a spin ensemble

We report the storage of microwave pulses at the single-photon level in a spin-ensemble memory consisting of

Towards a spin-ensemble quantum memory for superconducting qubits

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Scaling behavior of the crossover to short-stack regimes of Josephson vortex lattices in Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+delta stacks

nitrogen-vacancy centers in a diamond crystal coupled to a superconducting