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Nondemolition protocols use ancilla qubits to identify the fragile quantum state of a qubit without destroying its encoded information, thus playing a crucial role in nondestructive quantum measurements particularly relevant for quantum error correction. However, the multitude of ancilla preparations, information transfers, and ancilla measurements in these protocols create an intrinsic overhead for information processing. Here we consider an Andreev qubit defined in a quantum-dot Josephson junction and show that the intrinsic time-dependent oscillatory supercurrent arising from the quantum interference of the many-body eigenstates of the Andreev qubit, can be used to probe the qubit itself nondestructively and \textit{without} collapsing its quantum state. This nondestructive and non-collapsing readout of arbitrary superposition states of Andreev qubits avoids ancilla qubits altogether and significantly reduces experimental overhead as no repetitive qubit resetting is needed. Our findings should have an unprecedented impact on advancing research and applications involving Andreev dots, thus positioning them as promising qubit contenders for quantum processing and technologies., Comment: 7 pages and 3 figures

Spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) is crucial to the occurrence of phase transitions. Once a phase transition occurs, a quantum system presents degenerate eigenstates that lack the symmetry of the Hamiltonian. After crossing the critical point, the system is essentially evolved to a quantum superposition of these eigenstates until decoherence sets in. Despite the fundamental importance and potential applications in quantum technologies, such quantum-mechanical SSB phenomena have not been experimentally explored in many-body systems. We here present an experimental demonstration of the SSB process in the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model, governed by the competition between the individual driving and intra-qubit interaction. The model is realized in a circuit quantum electrodynamics system, where 6 Xmon qubits are coupled in an all-to-all manner through virtual photon exchange mediated by a resonator. The observed nonclassical correlations among these qubits in the symmetry-breaking region go beyond the conventional description of SSB, shedding new light on phase transitions for quantum many-body systems., Comment: 27 pages, 18 figures

We propose a scheme for measuring topological properties in a two-photon-driven Kerr-nonlinear resonator (KNR) subjected to a single-photon modulation. The topological properties are revealed through the observation of the Berry curvature and hence the first Chern number, as a nonadiabatic response of the physical observable to the change rate of the control parameter of the modulated drive. The parameter manifold, constructed from the system's Hamiltonian that determines its dynamics constrained in the state space spanned by the even and odd cat states as two basis states, is adjusted so that the degeneracy crossing the manifold indicates a topological transition. The scheme, with such continuous variable states in mesoscpic systems, provides a new perspective for exploration of the geometry and the related topology with complex systems.

A Kerr nonlinear oscillator (KNO) supports a pair of steady eigenstates, coherent states with opposite phases, that are good for the encoding of continuous variable qubit basis states. Arbitrary control of the KNO confined within the steady state subspace allows extraction of the Berry curvature through the linear response of the physical observable to the quench velocity of the system, providing an effective method for the characterization of topology in the KNO. As an alternative, the control adopting the "shortcut to adiabaticity" to the KNO enables the exploration of the topology through accelerated adiabatic eigenstate evolution to measure all three physical observables. Topological transitions are revealed by the jump of the first Chern number, obtained respectively from the integral of the Berry curvature and of the new polar angle relation, over the whole parameter space. Our strategy paves the way for measuring topological transitions in continuous variable systems., Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures

The environment-induced dissipation of an open system, once thought as a nuisance, can actually lead to emergence of many intriguing phenomena that are absent in an isolated system. Among these, Weyl exceptional rings (WER), extended from point-like singularities, are particularly interesting. Theoretically, a WER was predicted to carry a topological charge with a nonzero Chern number, but it has not been measured so far. We here investigate this topology in a circuit, where the WER is synthesized with a superconducting qubit controllably coupled to a decaying resonator. The high flexibility of the system enables us to characterize its eigenvectors on different manifolds of parameter space. We extract both the quantized Berry phase and Chern number from these eigenvectors. Furthermore, we demonstrate a topological transition triggered by shrinking the size of the manifold$-$a unique feature of the WER., Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures

Spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) plays a central role in understanding a large variety of phenomena associated with phase transitions, such as superfluid and superconductivity. So far, the transition from a symmetric vacuum to a macroscopically ordered phase has been substantially explored. The process bridging these two distinct phases is critical to understanding how a classical world emerges from a quantum phase transition, but so far remains unexplored in experiment. We here report an experimental demonstration of such a process with a quantum Rabi model engineered with a superconducting circuit. We move the system from the normal phase to the superradiant phase featuring two symmetry-breaking field components, one of which is observed to emerge as the classical reality. The results demonstrate that the environment-induced decoherence plays a critical role in the SSB., Comment: 13 pages,9 figures

We investigate the quantum phase transition in the anisotropic Dicke model through an examination of the quantum geometric tensor of the ground state. In this analysis, two distinct classical limits exhibit their unique anisotropic characteristics. The classical spin limit demonstrates a preference for the rotating-wave coupling, whereas the classical oscillator limit exhibits symmetry in the coupling strength of the bias. The anisotropic features of the classical spin limit persist at finite scales. Furthermore, we observe that the interplay among the anisotropic ratio, spin length, and frequency ratio can collectively enhance the critical behaviors. This critical enhancement without trade-off between these factors provides a flexible method for quantum precision measurement.

Critical systems near quantum phase transitions were predicted to be useful for improvement of metrological precision, thanks to their ultra-sensitive response to a tiny variation of the control Hamiltonian. Despite the promising perspective, realization of criticality-enhanced quantum metrology is an experimentally challenging task, mainly owing to the extremely long time needed to encode the signal to some physical quantity of a critical system. We here circumvent this problem by making use of the critical behaviors in the Jaynes-Cummings model, comprising a single qubit and a photonic resonator, to which the signal field is coupled. The information about the field amplitude is encoded in the qubit's excitation number in the dark state, which displays a divergent changing rate at the critical point. The most remarkable feature of this critical sensor is that the performance is insensitive to the leakage to bright eigenstates, caused by decoherence and non-adiabatic effects. We demonstrate such a metrological protocol in a superconducting circuit, where an Xmon qubit, interacting with a resonator, is used as a probe for estimating the amplitude of a microwave field coupled to the resonator. The measured quantum Fisher information exhibits a critical quantum enhancement, confirming the potential of this system for quantum metrology., Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures

Understanding the dynamical behavior of a qubit in a reservoir is critical to applications in quantum technological protocols, ranging from quantum computation to quantum metrology. The effect of the reservoir depends on reservoir's spectral structure, as well as on the qubit-reservoir coupling strength. We here propose a measure for quantifying the non-Markovian effect of a reservoir with a Lorentzian spectrum, based on the maximum qubit-reservoir quantum entanglement that can be extracted. Numerical simulation shows this entanglement exhibits a monotonous behavior in response to the variation of the coupling strength. We confirm the validity of this measure with an experiment, where a superconducting qubit is controllably coupled to a lossy resonator, which acts as a reservoir for the qubit. The experimental results illustrate the maximal extractable entanglement is progressively increased with the strengthening of the non-Markovianity.

Owing to the presence of exceptional points (EPs), non-Hermitian (NH) systems can display intriguing topological phenomena without Hermitian analogs. However, experimental characteristics of exceptional topological invariants have been restricted to second-order EPs (EP2s) in classical or semiclassical systems. We here propose an NH multi-qubit model with higher-order EPs, each of which is underlain by a multifold-degenerate multipartite entangled eigenstate. We implement the three-qubit model by controllably coupling a superconducting qubit to two microwave resonators, one serving as a Hermitian photonic qubit while the other as an NH qubit. We experimentally quantify the topological invariant for an EP3, by mapping out the complex eigenspectra along a loop surrounding this EP3 in the parameter space. The nonclassicality of the realized topology is manifested by the observed quantum correlations in the corresponding eigenstates. Our results extend research of exceptional topology to fully quantum-mechanical models with multi-partite entangled eigenstates. We further demonstrate the non-reciprocal transmission of a single photon, during which the photon is nonlocally shared by three individual elements.

Quantum operations by utilizing the underlying geometric phases produced in physical systems are favoured due to its potential robustness. When a system in a non-degenerate eigenstate undergoes an adiabatically cyclic evolution dominated by its Hamiltonian, it will get a geometric phase, referred to as the Berry Phase. While a non-adiabatically cyclic evolution produces an Aharonov-Anandan geometric phase. The two types of Abelian geometric phases are extended to the non-Abelian cases, where the phase factors become matrix-valued and the transformations associated with different loops are non-commutable. Abelian and non-Abelian (holonomic) operations are prevalent in discrete variable systems, whose limited (say, two) energy levels, form the qubit. While their developments in continuous systems have also been investigated, mainly due to that, bosonic modes (in, such as, cat states) with large Hilbert spaces, provide potential advantages in fault-tolerant quantum computation. Here we propose a feasible scheme to realize non-adiabatic holonomic quantum logic operations in continuous variable systems with cat codes. We construct arbitrary single-qubit (two-qubit) gates with the combination of single- and two-photon drivings applied to a Kerr Parametric Oscillator (KPO) (the coupled KPOs). Our scheme relaxes the requirements of the previously proposed quantum geometric operation strategies in continuous variable systems, providing an effective way for quantum control.

Parametrically driven nonlinear resonators represent a building block for realizing fault-tolerant quantum computation and are useful for critical quantum sensing. From a fundamental viewpoint, the most intriguing feature of such a system is perhaps the critical phenomena, which can occur without interaction with any other quantum system. The non-analytic behaviors of its eigenspectrum have been substantially investigated, but those associated with the ground state wavefunction have largely remained unexplored. Using the quantum ground state geometric tensor as an indicator, we comprehensively establish a phase diagram involving the driving parameter $\varepsilon$ and phase $\phi$. The results reveal that with the increase in $\varepsilon$, the system undergoes a quantum phase transition from the normal to the superradiant phase, with the critical point unaffected by $\phi$. Furthermore, the critical exponent and scaling dimension are obtained by an exact numerical method, which is consistent with previous works. Our numerical results show that the phase transition falls within the universality class of the quantum Rabi model. This work reveals that the quantum metric and Berry curvature display diverging behaviors across the quantum phase transition., Comment: Any comments or suggestions are welcome !

Bulk-boundary correspondences (BBCs) remain the central topic in modern condensed matter physics, and are gaining increasing interests with the recent discovery of non-Hermitian skin effects. However, there still exist profound features of BBCs that are beyond the existing framework. Here, we report the unexpected behavior of BBC when the Hamiltonian contains term of the form $d_0(k) I$, which serves as a momentum dependent energy shift. For Hermitian cases, momentum dependent energy shift can force the system to be semimetal, where topological phase transitions can take place with the upper and the lower bands keeping untouched. The proper modified BBC should be reconstructed from the perspective of the direct band gap. In non-Hermitian cases, skin effects are found to be capable of coexisting with the preserved BBC, of which the process can be greatly facilitated by the complex $d_0(k)I$. Remarkably, such results can be led a further step and contrary to the intuitive consideration, the modified BBC in Hermitian systems can be restored to be conventional by including extra non-Hermiticity. The physical origin for these phenomena lies in that $d_0(k)I$ can drastically change the point gap topology. Finally, the corresponding experimental simulations are proposed via the platforms of electric circuits.

We study the quantum metric in a driven Tavis-Cummings model, comprised of multiple qubits interacting with a quantized photonic field. The parametrical driving of the photonic field breaks the system's U(1) symmetry down to a ${\rm Z}_2$ symmetry, whose spontaneous breaking initiates a superradiant phase transition. We analytically solved the eigenenergies and eigenstates, and numerically simulated the system behaviors near the critical point. The critical behaviors near the superradiant phase transition are characterized by the quantum metric, defined in terms of the response of the quantum state to variation of the control parameter. In addition, a quantum metrological protocol based on the critical behaviors of the quantum metric near the superradiant phase transition is proposed, which enables greatly the achievable measurement precision., Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures

Critical phenomena of quantum systems are useful for enhancement of quantum sensing. However, experimental realizations of criticality enhancement have been confined to very few systems, owing to the stringent requirements, including the thermodynamical or scaling limit, and fine control of interacting quantum susystems or particles. We here propose a simple critical quantum sensing scheme that requires neither of these conditions. The critical system is realized with a single parametrically-driven bosonic mode involving many non-interacting bosons. We calculate the quantum Fisher information, and perform a simulation, which confirms the criticality-enabled enhancement. We further detail the response of one of the quadratures to the variation of the control parameter. The numerical results reveal that its inverted variance exhibits a diverging behavior at the critical point. Based on the presently available control techniques of parametric driving, we expect our scheme can be realized in different systems, e.g., ion traps and superconducting circuits., Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures

Quantum systems that undergo quantum phase transitions exhibit divergent susceptibility and can be exploited as probes to estimate physical parameters. We generalize the dynamic framework for criticality-enhanced quantum sensing by the quantum Rabi model (QRM) to its anisotropic counterpart and derive the correspondingly analytical expressions for the quantum Fisher information (QFI). We find that the contributions of the rotating-wave and counterrotating-wave interaction terms are symmetric at the limit of the infinite ratio of qubit frequency to field frequency, with the QFI reaching a maximum for the isotropic quantum Rabi model. At finite frequency scaling, we analytically derive the inverted variance of higher-order correction and find that it is more affected by the rotating-wave coupling than by the counterrotating-wave coupling.

Quantum sensing improves the accuracy of measurements of relevant parameters by exploiting the unique properties of quantum systems. The divergent susceptibility of physical systems near a critical point for quantum phase transition enables criticality-enhanced quantum sensing. The quantum Rabi model (QRM), composed of a single qubit coupled to a single bosonic field, represents a good candidate for realizing such critical enhancement for its simplicity, but it is experimentally challenging to achieve the ultrastrong qubit-field coupling required to realize the critical phenomena. In this work, we explore an alternative to construct the analog of the QRM for the sensing, exploiting the criticality appearing in the Jaynes-Cummings (JC) model whose bosonic field is parametrically driven, not necessitating the ultrastrong coupling condition thus to some extent relaxing the requirement for the practical implementation., Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures

Although originally predicted in relativistic quantum mechanics, Zitterbewegung can also appear in some classical systems, which leads to the important question of whether Zitterbewegung of Dirac particles is underlain by a more fundamental and universal interference behavior without classical analogs. We here reveal such an interference pattern in phase space, which underlies but goes beyond Zitterbewegung, and whose nonclassicality is manifested by the negativity of the phase space quasiprobability distribution, and the associated pseudospin-momentum entanglement. We confirm this discovery by numerical simulation and an on-chip experiment, where a superconducting qubit and a quantized microwave field respectively emulate the internal and external degrees of freedom of a Dirac particle. The measured quasiprobability negativities agree well with the numerical simulation. Besides being of fundamental importance, the demonstrated nonclassical effects are useful in quantum technology., Comment: 20 pages, 15 figures

Quantum error correction (QEC) aims to protect logical qubits from noises by utilizing the redundancy of a large Hilbert space, where an error, once it occurs, can be detected and corrected in real time. In most QEC codes, a logical qubit is encoded in some discrete variables, e.g., photon numbers. Such encoding schemes make the codewords orthogonal, so that the encoded quantum information can be unambiguously extracted after processing. Based on such discrete-variable encodings, repetitive QEC demonstrations have been reported on various platforms, but there the lifetime of the encoded logical qubit is still shorter than that of the best available physical qubit in the entire system, which represents a break-even point that needs to be surpassed for any QEC code to be of practical use. Here we demonstrate a QEC procedure with a logical qubit encoded in photon-number states of a microwave cavity, dispersively coupled to an ancilla superconducting qubit. By applying a pulse featuring a tailored frequency comb to the ancilla, we can repetitively extract the error syndrome with high fidelity and perform error correction with feedback control accordingly, thereby exceeding the break-even point by about 16% lifetime enhancement. Our work illustrates the potential of the hardware-efficient discrete-variable QEC codes towards a reliable quantum information processor., Comment: Main text: 8 pages, 3 figures, 1 table; Supplement: 12 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables

Non-Hermitian (NH) extension of quantum-mechanical Hamiltonians represents one of the most significant advancements in physics. During the past two decades, numerous captivating NH phenomena have been revealed and demonstrated, but all of which can appear in both quantum and classical systems. This leads to the fundamental question: what NH signature presents a radical departure from classical physics? The solution of this problem is indispensable for exploring genuine NH quantum mechanics, but remains experimentally untouched so far. Here, we resolve this basic issue by unveiling distinct exceptional entanglement phenomena, exemplified by an entanglement transition, occurring at the exceptional point of NH interacting quantum systems. We illustrate and demonstrate such purely quantum-mechanical NH effects with a naturally dissipative light-matter system, engineered in a circuit quantum electrodynamics architecture. Our results lay the foundation for studies of genuinely quantum-mechanical NH physics, signified by exceptional-point-enabled entanglement behaviors.

Superradiant phase transitions (SPTs) are important for understanding light-matter interactions at the quantum level, and play a central role in criticality-enhanced quantum sensing. So far, SPTs have been observed in driven-dissipative systems, but the emergent light fields did not show any nonclassical characteristic due to the presence of strong dissipation. Here we report an experimental demonstration of the SPT featuring the emergence of a highly nonclassical photonic field, realized with a resonator coupled to a superconducting qubit, implementing the quantum Rabi model. We fully characterize the light-matter state by Wigner matrix tomography. The measured matrix elements exhibit quantum interference intrinsic of a photonic mesoscopic superposition, and reveal light-matter entanglement, Comment: 20 pages, 19 figures, 2 tables

Quantum entanglement between an interfering particle and a detector for acquiring the which-path information plays a central role for enforcing Bohr's complementarity principle. However, the quantitative relation between this entanglement and the fringe visibility remains untouched upon for an initial mixed state. Here we find an equality for quantifying this relation. Our equality characterizes how well the interference pattern can be preserved when an interfering particle, initially carrying a definite amount of coherence, is entangled, to a certain degree, with a which-path detector. This equality provides a connection between entanglement and interference in the unified framework of coherence, revealing the quantitative entanglement-interference complementarity. We experimentally demonstrate this relation with a superconducting circuit, where a resonator serves as a which-path detector for an interfering qubit. The measured fringe visibility of the qubit's Ramsey signal and the qubit-resonator entanglement exhibit a complementary relation, in well agreement with the theoretical prediction., Comment: 19 pages, 9 figures, 1 table

We propose a method for the dynamical control in three-level open systems and realize it in the experiment with a superconducting qutrit. Our work demonstrates that in the Markovian environment for a relatively long time (3 us), the systemic populations or coherence can still strictly follow the preset evolution paths. This is the first experiment for precisely controlling the Markovian dynamics of three-level open systems, providing a solid foundation for the future realization of dynamical control in multiple open systems. An instant application of the techniques demonstrated in this experiment is to stabilize the energy of quantum batteries., Comment: 12 pages, 11 figures

We investigate two kinds of topological structures (sphere and torus) spanned by the controlled parameters of a driven two-level system's Hamiltonian, and consider the connection between the structures and the system's dynamics. We discuss the Berry curvature obtained through the dynamical response method, show the certain physical and observable manifolds including the gapped region probed by integrating the Berry curvature, and demonstrate the system's state evolution can be tracked and manipulated by extracting the Berry curvature., Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 1 appendix, accepted for publication in EPJP, Comments welcome

Holonomies, arising from non-Abelian geometric transformations of quantum states in Hilbert space, offer a promising way for quantum computation. These holonomies are not commutable and thus can be used for the realization of a universal set of quantum logic gates, where the global geometric feature may result in some noise-resilient advantages. Here we report the first on-chip realization of a non-Abelian geometric controlled-Not gate in a superconducting circuit, which is a building block for constructing a holonomic quantum computer. The conditional dynamics is achieved in an all-to-all connected architecture involving multiple frequency-tunable superconducting qubits controllably coupled to a resonator; a holonomic gate between any two qubits can be implemented by tuning their frequencies on resonance with the resonator and applying a two-tone drive to one of them. This gate represents an important step towards the all-geometric realization of scalable quantum computation on a superconducting platform., Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, 2 tables

Quantum correlations in observables of multiple systems not only are of fundamental interest, but also play a key role in quantum information processing. As a signature of these correlations, the violation of Bell inequalities has not been demonstrated with multipartite hybrid entanglement involving both continuous and discrete variables. Here we create a five-partite entangled state with three superconducting transmon qubits and two photonic qubits, each encoded in the mesoscopic field of a microwave cavity. We reveal the quantum correlations among these distinct elements by joint Wigner tomography of the two cavity fields conditional on the detection of the qubits and by test of a five-partite Bell inequality. The measured Bell signal is $8.381\pm0.038$, surpassing the bound of 8 for a four-partite entanglement imposed by quantum correlations by 10 standard deviations, demonstrating the genuine five-partite entanglement in a hybrid quantum system., Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures and supplement

No-cloning theorem forbids perfect cloning of an unknown quantum state. A universal quantum cloning machine (UQCM), capable of producing two copies of any input qubit with the optimal fidelity, is of fundamental interest and has applications in quantum information processing. This is enabled by delicately tailored nonclassical correlations between the input qubit and the copying qubits, which distinguish the UQCM from a classical counterpart, but whose experimental demonstrations are still lacking. We here implement the UQCM in a superconducting circuit, and investigate these correlations. The measured entanglements well agree with our theoretical prediction that they are independent of the input state and thus constitute a universal quantum behavior of the UQCM that was not previously revealed. Another feature of our experiment is the realization of deterministic and individual cloning, in contrast to previously demonstrated UQCMs, which either were probabilistic or did not constitute true cloning of individual qubits., Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, 1 table

Cavity optomechanical system involving an optical parametric amplifier (OPA) can exhibit rich classical and quantum dynamical behaviors. By simply modulating the frequency of the laser pumping the OPA, we find two interesting parameter regimes, with one of them enabling to study quantum-classical correspondence in system dynamics, while there exist no classical counterparts of the quantum features for the other. For the former regime, as the parametric gain of OPA increases to a critical value, the classical dynamics of the optical or mechanical modes can experience a transition from the regular periodic oscillation to period-doubling motion, in which cases the light-mechanical entanglement can be well studied by the logarithm negativity and can manifest the dynamical transition in the classical nonlinear dynamics. Moreover, the optomechanical entanglement shows a second-order transition characteristic at the critical parametric gain. For the latter regime, the kind of normal mode splitting comes up in the laser detuning dependence of optomechanical entanglement, which is induced by the squeezing of the optical and mechanical hybrid modes and finds no classical correspondence. The OPA assisted optomechanical systems therefore offer a simple way to study and exploit quantum manifestations of classical nonlinear dynamics., Comment: 10 pages, 12 figures

We propose a scheme to achieve nuclear-nuclear indirect interactions mediated by a mechanically driven nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond. Here we demonstrate two-qubit entangling gates and quantum-state transfer between two carbon nuclei. When dipole-dipole interaction strength is much larger than the driving field strength, the scheme is robust against decoherence caused by coupling between the NV center (nuclear spins) and the environment. Conveniently, precise control of dipole coupling is not required so this scheme is insensitive to fluctuating positions of the nuclear spins and the NV center. Our scheme provides a general blueprint for multi-nuclear-spin gates and for multi-party communication., Comment: 15 pages,7 figures

We propose a scheme for preparation of entangled coherent states for the motion of an ion in a two-dimensional anisotropic trap. In the scheme, the ion is driven by four laser beams along different directions in the ion trap plane, resulting in carrier excitation and couplings between the internal and external degrees of freedom. When the total quantum number of the vibrational modes initially has a definite parity, the competition between the unitary dynamics and spontaneous emission will force the system to evolve to a steady state, where the vibrational modes are in a two-mode cat state. We show that the method can be extended to realization of entangled coherent states for three vibrational modes of an ion in a three-dimensional anisotropic trap., Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures

Entanglement swapping, the process to entangle two particles without coupling them in any way, is one of the most striking manifestations of the quantum-mechanical nonlocal characteristic. Besides fundamental interest, this process has applications in complex entanglement manipulation and quantum communication. Here we report a high-fidelity, unconditional entanglement swapping experiment in a superconducting circuit. The measured concurrence characterizing the qubit-qubit entanglement produced by swapping is above 0.75, confirming most of the entanglement of one qubit with its partner is deterministically transferred to another qubit that has never interacted with it. We further realize delayed-choice entanglement swapping, showing whether two qubits previously behaved as in an entangled state or as in a separable state is determined by a later choice of the type of measurement on their partners. This is the first demonstration of entanglement-separability duality in a deterministic way., Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, 4 tables

Preparation of entangled steady states via dissipation and pumping in Rydberg atoms has been recently found to be useful for quantum information processing. The driven-dissipative dynamics is closely related to the natural linewidth of the Rydberg states and can be usually modulated by engineering the thermal reservior. Instead of modifying the effectively radiative decay, we propose an alternatively optimized scheme, which combines the resonant Rydberg antiblockade excitation and the Lyapunov control of the ground states to speed up the prepration of the singlet state for two interacting Rydberg atoms. The acceleration process strongly depends on the initial state of the system with respect to the initial coherence between the singlet state and decoherence-sensitive bright state. We study the optimal parameter regime for fast entanglement preparation and the robustness of the fidelity against random noises. The numerical results show that a fidelity above 0.99 can be achieved around 0.4 ms with the current experimental parameters. The scheme may be generalized for preparation of more complicate multi-atom entangled states., Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures

To realize fault-tolerant quantum computing, it is necessary to store quantum information in logical qubits with error correction functions, realized by distributing a logical state among multiple physical qubits or by encoding it in the Hilbert space of a high-dimensional system. Quantum gate operations between these error-correctable logical qubits, which are essential for implementation of any practical quantum computational task, have not been experimentally demonstrated yet. Here we demonstrate a geometric method for realizing controlled-phase gates between two logical qubits encoded in photonic fields stored in cavities. The gates are realized by dispersively coupling an ancillary superconducting qubit to these cavities and driving it to make a cyclic evolution depending on the joint photonic state of the cavities, which produces a conditional geometric phase. We first realize phase gates for photonic qubits with the logical basis states encoded in two quasiorthogonal coherent states, which have important implications for continuous-variable-based quantum computation. Then we use this geometric method to implement a controlled-phase gate between two binomially encoded logical qubits, which have an error-correctable function., Comment: main text: 7 pages, 4 figures; supplement: 6 pages, 5 figures

In this paper, we propose a scheme to eliminate the influence of noises on system dynamics, by means of a sequential unsharp measurements and unitary feedback operations. The unsharp measurements are carried out periodically during system evolution, while the feedback operations are well designed based on the eigenstates of the density matrices of the exact (noiseless) dynamical states and its corresponding post-measurement states. For illustrative examples, we show that the dynamical trajectory errors caused by both static and non-static noises are successfully eliminated in typical two-level and multi-level systems, i.e., the high-fidelity quantum dynamics can be maintained. Furthermore, we discuss the influence of noise strength and measurement strength on the degree of precise quantum control. Crucially, the measurement-feedback scheme is quite universal in that it can be applied to precise quantum control for any dimension systems. Thus, it naturally finds extensive applications in quantum information processing., Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures

In this paperwe propose two theoretical schemes for implementation of quantum phase gates by engineering the phase-sensitive dark state of two atoms subjected to Rydberg-Rydberg interaction. Combining the conventional adiabatic techniques and currently developed approaches of phase control, a feasible proposal for implementation of a geometric phase gate is presented, where the conditional phase shift (Berry phase) is achieved by adiabatically and cyclically changing the parameters of the driving fields. Here we find that the geometric phase acquired is related to the way how the relative phase is modulated. In the second scheme, the system Hamiltonian is adiabatically changed in a noncyclic manner, so that the acquired conditional phase is not a Berry phase. A detailed analysis of the experimental feasibility and the effect of decoherence is also given. The proposed schemes provide new perspectives for adiabatic manipulation of interacting Rydberg systems with tailored phase modulation., Comment: 9 pages, 9 figures

We investigate the dynamics of an optomechanical system where a cavity with a movable mirror involves a degenerate optical parametric amplifier and is driven by a periodically modulated laser field. Our results show that the cooperation between the parametric driving and periodically modulated cavity driving results in a two-fold squeezing on the movable cavity mirror that acts as a mechanical oscillator. This allows the fluctuation of the mechanical oscillator in one quadrature (momentum or position) to be reduced to a level that cannot be reached by solely applying either of these two drivings. In addition to the fundamental interests, e.g., study of quantum effects at the macroscopic level and exploration of the quantum-to-classical transition, our results have potential applications in ultrasensitive sensing of force and motion., Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures

On the background of the Born-Oppenheimer (adiabatic) approximation, we investigate the geometrical and topological structure in the theory of quantum gravity by using the path integral method and halfclassical approximation. As we know, Berry curvature can be extracted from the linear response of a driven two-level system to nonadiabatic manipulations of its Hamiltonian. In parameter space of the Hamiltonian, magnetic monopoles can be artificially simulated. Ripples occur in Hilbert space when the monopole travels from inside to outside the surface of energy manifold spanned by system parameters. From this point of view, we set up the connection between the ripples characterized by the fidelity of quantum states in Hilbert space and gravitational-like waves in minisuperspace. This might open a window for the study of geometrical and topological properties of quantum gravity with the help of quantum physical systems., Comment: All suggestions will be welcome

With the help of the Berry curvature and the first Chern number $($$\textit{C}_1$$)$, we both analytically and numerically investigate and thus simulate artificial magnetic monopoles formed in parameter space of the Hamiltonian of a driven superconducting qubit. The topological structure of a spin-1/2 system $($qubit$)$ can be captured by the distribution of Berry curvature, which describes the geometry of eigenstates of the Hamiltonian. Degeneracy points in parameter space act as sources $($$\textit{C}_1$ = $1$$)$ or sinks $($$\textit{C}_1$ = $-1$$)$ of the magnetic field. We note that the strength of the magnetic field $($described by Berry curvature$)$ has an apparent impact on the quantum states during the process of topological transition. It exhibits an unusual property that the transition of the quantum states is asymmetric when the degenerate point passes from outside to inside and again outside the manifold spanned by system parameters. Our results also pave the way to explore intriguing properties of magnetic monopoles in other spin-1/2 systems., Comment: References have been accpeted by Laser Physics Letters

We theoretically investigate the stability of a two cascaded cavity optomechanical system with optical parametric amplifiers (OPAs) inside the two coupled cavities, and study the steady-state entanglement between two distant mechanical resonators. We show that the parameter regime where the system is unstable without OPAs, such as relatively high laser intensity and blue detuning, can be exploited to build the steady-state mechanical entanglement by modulating the parametric gain. The application of OPAs is helpful to preserve the mechanical entanglement suffered from the dissipation at some finite temperature. The scheme provides an alternative way for improving and engineering the quantum entanglement of two distant mechanical oscillators., Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures

A quantum network is a promising quantum many-body system because of its tailored geometry and controllable interaction. Here, we propose an external control scheme for the qubit-photon interaction and multiqubit reset in a dissipative quantum network, which comprises superconducting circuit chains with microwave drives and filter-filter couplings. The traditional multiqubit reset of the quantum network requires physically disconnected qubits to prevent their entanglement. However, we use an original effect of dissipation, i.e., consuming the entanglement generated by qubits' interaction, to achieve an external control of the multiqubit reset in an always-connected superconducting circuit. The reset time is independent of the number of qubits in the quantum network. Our proposal can tolerate considerable fluctuations in the system parameters and can be applicable to higher-dimensional quantum networks., Comment: Comments are welcome!

The excitation dynamics of a laser-driven Rydberg gas exhibits a cooperative effect due to the interatomic Rydberg-Rydberg interaction, but the large many-body system with inhomogeneous Rydberg coupling is hard to exactly solved or numerically study by density matrix equations. In this paper, we find that the laser-driven Rydberg gas with most of the atoms being in the ground state can be described by a simplified interaction model resembling the optical Kerr effect if the distance-dependent Rydberg-Rydberg interaction is replaced by an infinite-range coupling. We can then quantitatively study the effect of the quantum fluctuations on the Rydberg excitation with the interatomic correlation involved and analytically calculate the statistical characteristics of the excitation dynamics in the steady state, revealing the quantum signature of the driven-dissipative Rydberg gas. The results obtained here will be of great interest for other spin-1/2 systems with spin-spin coupling., Comment: Main text (8 pages, 8 figures)

Universal computation of a quantum system consisting of superpositions of well-separated coherent states of multiple harmonic oscillators can be achieved by three families of adiabatic holonomic gates. The first gate consists of moving a coherent state around a closed path in phase space, resulting in a relative Berry phase between that state and the other states. The second gate consists of "colliding" two coherent states of the same oscillator, resulting in coherent population transfer between them. The third gate is an effective controlled-phase gate on coherent states of two different oscillators. Such gates should be realizable via reservoir engineering of systems which support tunable nonlinearities, such as trapped ions and circuit QED., Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures + 4 page supplement; (v3 scheme now universal; v4 title changed to match published version); gate animations available at http://dancingblobs.krastanov.org/