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Published Online November 10, 2005
Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1119678

Reports

Submitted on September 2, 2005
Accepted on November 1, 2005

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. Orlando 2

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

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

We demonstrate Mach-Zehnder-type interferometry in a superconducting flux qubit. The qubit is a tunable artificial atom, whose ground and excited states exhibit an avoided crossing. Strongly driving the qubit with harmonic excitation sweeps it through the avoided crossing two times per period. As 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 ...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.


THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
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S. O. Valenzuela, W. D. Oliver, D. M. Berns, K. K. Berggren, L. S. Levitov, and T. P. Orlando (2006)
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Coherent state evolution in a superconducting qubit from partial-collapse measurement..
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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)