Princeton University Department of Physics

Senior thesis

Non-Equilibrium Quantum Phases In The Jaynes-Cummings Lattice

Author: Marius Constantin
Abstract Superconducting circuits provide a platform to conduct on-chip strongly correlated manybody experiments by strongly coupling microwave photons to superconducting qubits [2]. The attractive characteristics of these systems include the ability to precisely engineer almost any parameter through microfabrication techniques [5], the absence of impurities, and recently the ability to control disorder in the system [7]. We fabricate a lattice in which each site is constituted of a microwave resonator strongly coupled to a superconducting qubit, thus realizing the Jaynes-Cummings model at each lattice site. The high Q lattice that results from having a low coupling to the environment will allow us to investigate the non-equilibrium steady state regime characteristic of an open quantum system driven continuously. The strong coupling between the photons and the qubit excitations gives rise to hybrid elementary excitations known as polaritons. It has been theoretically shown that these particles exhibit distinct quantum phases determined by the competition between the on-s3ite interaction energy and the nearest neighbor hopping energy [4]. We hope to characterize the Mott insulator phase, in which each lattice site has a well dened polariton number, as well as the superuid phase, in which polaritons are delocalized. We aim to perform computer simulations that implement models of the behavior of quantum phases theoretically predicted to exist in an innite size lattice when restricted to our limited size experiment. In order to overcome the notorious computational intractability of the simulation of a such a large quantum system, we will employ an inhomogeneous mean-eld approach that captures the emergent physics while solving the master Lindblad equation in a truncated Hilbert space. Experimentally, there are a few possible means to observe the dierent quantum phases. One of them is doing quantum non-demolition measurements of photon statistics in the central lattice site by coupling an additional measurement qubit [3]. In the Mott insulator phase, the statistics of the photon number in the center resonator exhibit the characteristic absence of quantum uctuations. The superuid phase would be consistent with measuring poissonian statistics of the photon number in the center resonator. Another measurable experimental signature [1] of the superuid phase is given by the correlation between two non-adjacent edge lattice sites, which could be used to distinguish between the Mott insulator and the superuid phases [6]. In the superuid phase, we expect to detect a long-range o-diagonal order [8] in our system.

Advisor: Prof. Andrew Houck Second Reader: Undeclared

October 18, 2013

I pledge my honor that this represents my own work according to University policy. Marius Constantin

References
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