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A common approach to detecting weak signals or minute quantities involves leveraging on the localized spectral features of resonant modes, where sharper lines (i.e. high Q-factors) enhance transduction sensitivity. However, maximizing the Q-factor often introduced technical challenges in fabrication and design. In this work, we propose an alternative strategy to achieve sharper spectral features by using interference and nonlinearity, all while maintaining a constant dissipation rate. Using far-infrared thermomechanical detectors as a test case, we demonstrate that signal transduction along an engineered response curve slope effectively reduces the detector's noise equivalent power (NEP). This method, combined with an optimized absorbing layer, achieves sub-pW NEP for electrical read-out detectors operating in the sub-THz range., Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures

Reaching high cavity population with a coherent pump in the strong-coupling regime of a single-atom laser is impossible due to the photon blockade effect. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate that in a single-atom maser based on a transmon strongly coupled to two resonators it is possible to pump over a dozen of photons into the system. The first high-quality resonator plays a role of usual lasing cavity, and the second one presents a controlled dissipation channel, bolstering population inversion, and modifies the energy level structure to lift the blockade. As a confirmation of lasing action, we observe conventional laser features such as the narrowing of emission linewidth and external signal amplification. Additionally, we report unique single-atom features: self-quenching and several lasing thresholds., Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, supplementary information

We report on helicity sensitive photovoltaic terahertz radiation response of a carbon nanotube made in a conguration of a field effect transistor. We find that the magnitude of the rectified voltage is different for clockwise and anticlockwise circularly polarized radiation. We demonstrate that this effect is a fingerprint of the plasma waves interference in the transistor channel. We also find that that the presence of the helicity- and phase-sensitive interference part of the photovoltaic response is a universal phenomenon which is obtained in the systems of different dimensionality with different single particle spectrum. Its magnitude is characteristic of the plasma wave decay length. This opens up a wide avenue for applications in the area of plasmonic interferometry.

We demonstrate non-equilibrium steady-state photon transport through a chain of five coupled artificial atoms simulating the driven-dissipative Bose-Hubbard model. Using transmission spectroscopy, we show that the system retains many-particle coherence despite being coupled strongly to two open spaces. We show that system energy bands may be visualized with high contrast using cross-Kerr interaction. For vanishing disorder, we observe the transition of the system from the linear to the nonlinear regime of photon blockade in excellent agreement with the input-output theory. Finally, we show how controllable disorder introduced to the system suppresses this non-local photon transmission. We argue that proposed architecture may be applied to analog simulation of many-body Floquet dynamics with even larger arrays of artificial atoms paving an alternative way to demonstration of quantum supremacy, Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, supplemental material

We present a blueprint for a maser with a single three-level transmon superconducting artificial atom. The system can be pumped coherently via a two-photon process, and to achieve high population inversion, the relaxation rate of the metastable state is increased via an auxiliary low-Q cavity coupled to a transition between the transmon excited states. We show numerically that such a maser can operate both in the intermediate coupling regime with super-Poissonian photon statistics and in the strong coupling regime, where the statistics is sub-Poissonian. For the former, the maser exhibits thresholdless behavior and for the latter, there is a well-defined pumping threshold. A useful side-effect of the auxiliary resonator is that it allows to overcome the photon blockade effect for the pump, which would otherwise prevent high photon population. Finally, we observe the bistability of the steady-state Wigner function and the self-quenching effect for some parameters.

Plasmonic interferometry is a rapidly growing area of research with a huge potential for applications in terahertz frequency range. In this Letter, we explore a plasmonic interferometer based on graphene Field Effect Transistor connected to specially designed antennas. As a key result, we observe helicity- and phase-sensitive conversion of circularly-polarized radiation into dc photovoltage caused by the plasmon-interference mechanism: two plasma waves, excited at the source and drain part of the transistor interfere inside the channel. The helicity sensitive phase shift between these waves is achieved by using an asymmetric antenna configuration. The dc signal changes sign with inversion of the helicity. Suggested plasmonic interferometer is capable for measuring of phase difference between two arbitrary phase-shifted optical signals. The observed effect opens a wide avenue for phase-sensisitve probing of plasma wave excitations in two-dimensional materials.

In this work, we irradiate a superconducting artificial molecule composed of two coupled tunable transmons with microwave light while monitoring its state via joint dispersive readout. Performing high-power spectroscopy, we observe and identify a variety of single- and multiphoton transitions. We also find that at certain fluxes, the measured spectrum of the system deviates significantly from the solution of the stationary Schr\"odinger equation with no driving. We reproduce these unusual spectral features by solving numerically the full master equation for a steady-state and attribute them to an Autler-Townes-like effect in which a single tone is simultaneously dressing the system and probing the transitions between new eigenstates. We show that it is possible to find analytically the exact frequencies at which the satellite spectral lines appear by solving self-consistent equations in the rotating frame. Our approach agrees well with both the experiment and the numerical simulation., Comment: 18 pages, 9 figures

Physical systems for quantum computation require calibration of the control parameters based on their physical characteristics by performing a chain of experiments that gather most precise information about the given device. It follows that there is a need for automated data acquisition and interpretation. In this work, we have developed a tool that allows for automatic analysis of single-tone spectroscopy (STS) results for a single cell consisting of qubit and resonator in the circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) architecture. Using analytic approaches and maximum likelihood estimation, our algorithm is capable of finding all relevant physical characteristics of the cell by using only the measured STS data. The described approach is fast and robust to noise, and its open-source Python implementation can readily be used to calibrate transmon qubits coupled to notch-port resonators., Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures

Plasmons, collective oscillations of electron systems, can efficiently couple light and electric current, and thus can be used to create sub-wavelength photodetectors, radiation mixers, and on-chip spectrometers. Despite considerable effort, it has proven challenging to implement plasmonic devices operating at terahertz frequencies. The material capable to meet this challenge is graphene as it supports long-lived electrically-tunable plasmons. Here we demonstrate plasmon-assisted resonant detection of terahertz radiation by antenna-coupled graphene transistors that act as both plasmonic Fabry-Perot cavities and rectifying elements. By varying the plasmon velocity using gate voltage, we tune our detectors between multiple resonant modes and exploit this functionality to measure plasmon wavelength and lifetime in bilayer graphene as well as to probe collective modes in its moir\'e minibands. Our devices offer a convenient tool for further plasmonic research that is often exceedingly difficult under non-ambient conditions (e.g. cryogenic temperatures and strong magnetic fields) and promise a viable route for various photonic applications., Comment: 19 pages, 12 figures

Graphene is considered as a promising platform for detectors of high-frequency radiation up to the terahertz (THz) range due to graphene$'$s superior electron mobility. Previously it has been shown that graphene field effect transistors (FETs) exhibit room temperature broadband photoresponse to incoming THz radiation thanks to the thermoelectric and/or plasma wave rectification. Both effects exhibit similar functional dependences on the gate voltage and therefore it was found to be difficult to disentangle these contributions in the previous studies. In this letter, we report on combined experimental and theoretical studies of sub-THz response in graphene field-effect transistors analyzed at different temperatures. This temperature-dependent study allowed us to reveal the role of photo-thermoelectric effect, p-n junction rectification, and plasmonic rectification in the sub-THz photoresponse of graphene FETs., Comment: 5 pages + 5 pages Supplementary information

We consider the carrier transport and plasmonic phenomena in the lateral carbon nanotube (CNT) networks forming the device channel with asymmetric electrodes. One electrode is the Ohmic contact to the CNT network and the another contact is the Schottky contact. These structures can serve as detectors of the terahertz (THz) radiation. We develop the device model for response of the lateral CNT networks which comprise a mixture of randomly oriented semiconductor CNTs (s-CNTs) and quasi-metal CNTs (m-CNTs). The proposed model includes the concept of the two-dimensional plasmons in relatively dense networks of randomly oriented CNTs (CNT "felt") and predicts the detector responsivity spectral characteristics. The detection mechanism is the rectification of the ac current due the nonlinearity of the Schottky contact current-voltage characteristics under the conditions of a strong enhancement of the potential drop at this contact associated with the plasmon excitation. We demonstrate that the excitation of the two-dimensional plasmons by incoming THz radiation the detector responsivity can induce sharp resonant peaks of the detector responsivity at the signal frequencies corresponding to the plasmonic resonances. The detector responsivity depends on the fractions of the s- and m-CNTs. The burning of the near-contact regions of the m-CNTs or destruction of these CNTs leads to a marked increase in the responsivity in agreement with our experimental data. The resonant THz detectors with sufficiently dense lateral CNT networks can compete and surpass other THz detectors using plasmonic effects at room temperatures., Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures

The quantum efficiency of an electroluminescent intersubband emitter based on InAs/AlSb has been measured as a function of the magnetic field up to 20T. Two series of oscillations periodic in 1/B are observed, corresponding to the elastic and inelastic scattering of electrons of the upper state of the radiative transitions. Experimental results are accurately reproduced by a calculation of the excited state lifetime as a function of the applied magnetic field. The interpretation of these data gives an exact measure of the relative weight of the scattering mechanisms and allows the extraction of material parameters such as the energy dependent electron effective mass and the optical phonon energy., Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures

An experimental evidence of subwavelength imaging with a "lens", which is a uniaxial negative permittivity wire medium slab, is reported. The slab is formed by gratings of long thin parallel conducting cylinders. Taking into account the anisotropy and spatial dispersion in the wire medium we theoretically show that there are no usual plasmons that could be exited on surfaces of such a slab, and there is no resonant enhancement of evanescent fields in the slab. The experimentally observed clear improvement of the resolution in the presence of the slab is explained as filtering out the harmonics with small wavenumbers. In other words, the wire gratings (the wire medium) suppress strong traveling-mode components increasing the role of evanescent waves in the image formation. This effect can be used in near-field imaging and detection applications., Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures