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Superconducting circuits are a competitive platform for quantum computation because they offer controllability, long coherence times and strong interactions—properties that are essential for the study of quantum materials comprising microwave photons. However, intrinsic photon losses in these circuits hinder the realization of quantum many-body phases. Here we use superconducting circuits to explore strongly correlated quantum matter by building a Bose–Hubbard lattice for photons in the strongly interacting regime. We develop a versatile method for dissipative preparation of incompressible many-body phases through reservoir engineering and apply it to our system to stabilize a Mott insulator of photons against losses. Site- and time-resolved readout of the lattice allows us to investigate the microscopic details of the thermalization process through the dynamics of defect propagation and removal in the Mott phase. Our experiments demonstrate the power of superconducting circuits for studying strongly correlated matter in both coherent and engineered dissipative settings. In conjunction with recently demonstrated superconducting microwave Chern insulators, we expect that our approach will enable the exploration of topologically ordered phases of matter.

Change history:In this Article, two additional references (now added as refs 12and 14) should have been cited at the end of the sentence “Recently, photonic systems have emerged as a platform of interest for the exploration of synthetic quantum matter.”. This has been corrected online.

In this paper we introduce an approach to Hamiltonian tomography of noninteracting tight-binding photonic lattices. To begin with, we prove that the matrix element of the low-energy effective Hamiltonian between sites α and ß may be obtained directly from Sαß(ω), the (suitably normalized) two-port measurement between sites α and ß at frequency ω. This general result enables complete characterization of both on-site energies and tunneling matrix elements in arbitrary lattice networks by spectroscopy, and suggests that coupling between lattice sites is a topological property of the two-port spectrum. We further provide extensions of this technique for measurement of band projectors in finite, disordered systems with good band flatness ratios, and apply the tool to direct real-space measurement of the Chern number. Our approach demonstrates the extraordinary potential of microwave quantum circuits for exploration of exotic synthetic materials, providing a clear path to characterization and control of single-particle properties of Jaynes-Cummings-Hubbard lattices. More broadly, we provide a robust, unified method of spectroscopic characterization of linear networks from photonic crystals to microwave lattices and everything in between. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We suggest a simple approach to populate photonic quantum materials at nonzero chemical potential and near-zero temperature. Taking inspiration from forced evaporation in cold-atom experiments, the essential ingredients for our low-entropy thermal reservoir are (a) interparticle interactions and (b) energy-dependent loss. The resulting thermal reservoir may then be coupled to a broad class of Hamiltonian systems to produce low-entropy quantum phases. We present an idealized picture of such a reservoir, deriving the scaling of reservoir entropy with system parameters, and then propose several practical implementations using only standard circuit quantum electrodynamics tools, and extract the fundamental performance limits. Finally, we explore, both analytically and numerically, the coupling of such a thermalizer to the paradigmatic Bose-Hubbard chain, where we employ it to stabilize an n = 1 Mott phase. In this case, the performance is limited by the interplay of dynamically arrested thermalization of the Mott insulator and finite heat capacity of the thermalizer, characterized by its repumping rate. This work explores an approach to preparation of quantum phases of strongly interacting photons, and provides a potential route to topologically protected phases that are difficult to reach through adiabatic evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]