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Originally published in Science Express on 10 November 2005
Science 9 December 2005:
Vol. 310. no. 5754, pp. 1653 - 1657
DOI: 10.1126/science.1119678
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Reports

Mach-Zehnder Interferometry in a Strongly Driven Superconducting Qubit

William D. Oliver,1* Yang Yu,2 Janice C. Lee,2 Karl K. Berggren,2 Leonid S. Levitov,3 Terry P. Orlando2

We demonstrate Mach-Zehnder–type interferometry in a superconducting flux qubit. The qubit is a tunable artificial atom, the ground and excited states of which exhibit an avoided crossing. Strongly driving the qubit with harmonic excitation sweeps it through the avoided crossing two times per period. Because the induced Landau-Zener transitions act as coherent beamsplitters, the accumulated phase between transitions, which varies with microwave amplitude, results in quantum interference fringes for n = 1 to 20 photon transitions. The generalization of optical Mach-Zehnder interferometry, performed in qubit phase space, provides an alternative means to manipulate and characterize the qubit in the strongly driven regime.

1 MIT Lincoln Laboratory, 244 Wood Street, Lexington, MA 02420, USA.
2 Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
3 Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: oliver{at}ll.mit.edu

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THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
Microwave-Induced Cooling of a Superconducting Qubit.
S. O. Valenzuela, W. D. Oliver, D. M. Berns, K. K. Berggren, L. S. Levitov, and T. P. Orlando (2006)
Science 314, 1589-1592
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Coherent state evolution in a superconducting qubit from partial-collapse measurement..
N. Katz, M. Ansmann, R. C. Bialczak, E. Lucero, R. McDermott, M. Neeley, M. Steffen, E. M. Weig, A. N. Cleland, J. M. Martinis, et al. (2006)
Science 312, 1498-1500
   Abstract »    Full Text »    PDF »


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