Abstract
On the level of single atoms and photons, the coupling between atoms and the electromagnetic field is typically very weak. By using a cavity to confine the field, the strength of this interaction can be increased by many orders of magnitude, to a point where it dominates over any dissipative process. This strong-coupling regime of cavity quantum electrodynamics has been reached for real atoms in optical cavities, and for artificial atoms in circuit quantum electrodynamics and quantum dot systems. A signature of strong coupling is the splitting of the cavity transmission peak into a pair of resolvable peaks when a single resonant atom is placed inside the cavity, an effect known as vacuum Rabi splitting. The circuit quantum electrodynamics architecture is ideally suited for going beyond this linear-response effect. Here, we show that increasing the drive power results in two unique nonlinear features in the transmitted heterodyne signal: the supersplitting of each vacuum Rabi peak into a doublet and the appearance of extra peaks with the characteristic spacing of the Jaynes-Cummings ladder. These findings constitute direct evidence for the coupling between the quantized microwave field and the anharmonic spectrum of a superconducting qubit acting as an artificial atom.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 105-109 |
| Number of pages | 5 |
| Journal | Nature Physics |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Feb 2009 |
Funding
This work has been supported by Yale University via a Quantum Information and Mesoscopic Physics Fellowship (A.A.H., J.K.), the LPS/NSA-ARO grant W911NF-05-1-0365, NSF grants DMR-0653377, DMR-0603369 and PHY-0653073 and by the Academy of Finland. We thank J. Gambetta, A. Blais and A. Wallraff for helpful discussions, and L. Frunzio and B. Johnson for fabrication of the sample.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Physics and Astronomy