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Science 8 December 2006:
Vol. 314. no. 5805, pp. 1589 - 1592
DOI: 10.1126/science.1134008
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Reports

Microwave-Induced Cooling of a Superconducting Qubit

Sergio O. Valenzuela,1* William D. Oliver,2 David M. Berns,3 Karl K. Berggren,2{dagger} Leonid S. Levitov,3 Terry P. Orlando4

We demonstrated microwave-induced cooling in a superconducting flux qubit. The thermal population in the first-excited state of the qubit is driven to a higher-excited state by way of a sideband transition. Subsequent relaxation into the ground state results in cooling. Effective temperatures as low as {approx}3 millikelvin are achieved for bath temperatures of 30 to 400 millikelvin, a cooling factor between 10 and 100. This demonstration provides an analog to optical cooling of trapped ions and atoms and is generalizable to other solid-state quantum systems. Active cooling of qubits, applied to quantum information science, provides a means for qubit-state preparation with improved fidelity and for suppressing decoherence in multi-qubit systems.

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

{dagger} Present address: Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

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

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