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Science 9 December 2005:
Vol. 310. no. 5754, p. 1581
DOI: 10.1126/science.310.5754.1581c
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Mach-Zehnder interferometry is a powerful technique to probe quantum optical effects. Such interferometers contain two beam splitters. The first sends two beams of photons along separate paths. The acquired path or phase difference the two beams may acquire creates interference fringes after the second beam splitter recombines the two beams. Oliver et al. (p. 1653, published online 10 November) show that a two-level superconducting qubit can also be made to exhibit similar interference fringes. In this case, the anti-crossing between the ground and excited states acts as the beam splitter, and the energy level splitting between them corresponds to the optical path difference. Multiple photon transitions (up to 20) can be induced, thus illustrating a potentially useful route for the manipulation of superconducting qubits in quantum computing schemes.




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