Explore the vast range of titles available.

Circuit training Atomic physics, quantum optics, nanoscience and condensed matter physics are partly merging as new interdisciplinary areas form to involve all of these traditionally separate subfields. For instance, superconducting circuits can be engineered to exhibit quantum phenomena that are normally associated with atomic systems, and so provide a platform for testing various ideas in atomic physics and quantum optics. Jian-Qiang You and Franco Nori review the progress made in this field, and anticipate the fundamental and practical directions that future work will take. Superconducting circuits based on Josephson junctions exhibit macroscopic quantum coherence and can behave like artificial atoms. Recent technological advances have made it possible to implement atomic-physics and quantum-optics experiments on a chip using these artificial atoms. This Review presents a brief overview of the progress achieved so far in this rapidly advancing field. We not only discuss phenomena analogous to those in atomic physics and quantum optics with natural atoms, but also highlight those not occurring in natural atoms. In addition, we summarize several prospective directions in this emerging interdisciplinary field.

The dipole approximation is usually employed to describe light-matter interactions under ordinary conditions. With the development of artificial atomic systems, ‘giant atom’ physics is possible, where the scale of atoms is comparable to or even greater than the wavelength of the light they interact with, and the dipole approximation is no longer valid. It reveals interesting physics impossible in small atoms and may offer useful applications. Here, we experimentally demonstrate the giant spin ensemble (GSE), where a ferromagnetic spin ensemble interacts twice with the meandering waveguide, and the coupling strength between them can be continuously tuned from finite (coupled) to zero (decoupled) by varying the frequency. In the nested configuration, we investigate the collective behavior of two GSEs and find extraordinary phenomena that cannot be observed in conventional systems. Our experiment offers a new platform for ‘giant atom’ physics. ‘Giant atom’ physics occurs when the size of the atomic system becomes comparable to the wavelength of the light it interacts with. For atoms, such a regime is impossible to reach, however, for artificial atomic systems such ‘giant atom’ physics can be explored. Here, Wang et al demonstrate giant spin ensembles, consisting of magnetic spheres coupled to a microwave waveguide.

Magnon–polaritons are hybrid light–matter quasiparticles originating from the strong coupling between magnons and photons. They have emerged as a potential candidate for implementing quantum transducers and memories. Owing to the dampings of both photons and magnons, the polaritons have limited lifetimes. However, stationary magnon–polariton states can be reached by a dynamical balance between pumping and losses, so the intrinsically nonequilibrium system may be described by a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian. Here we design a tunable cavity quantum electrodynamics system with a small ferromagnetic sphere in a microwave cavity and engineer the dissipations of photons and magnons to create cavity magnon–polaritons which have non-Hermitian spectral degeneracies. By tuning the magnon–photon coupling strength, we observe the polaritonic coherent perfect absorption and demonstrate the phase transition at the exceptional point. Our experiment offers a novel macroscopic quantum platform to explore the non-Hermitian physics of the cavity magnon–polaritons. Strong coupling between magnons and photons allows coupling of magnongs to qubits, suggesting that magnon-polaritons could find applications in quantum information. Here, Zhang et al. observe an exceptional point and spontaneous symmetry breaking in a cavity magnon-polariton system.

Building hybrid quantum systems is a crucial step for realizing multifunctional quantum technologies, quantum information processing, and hybrid quantum networks. A functional hybrid quantum system requires strong coupling among its components, however, couplings between distinct physical systems are typically very weak. Here we demonstrate the realization of triple strong coupling in a polaromechanical hybrid system where polaritons, formed by strongly coupled ferromagnetic magnons and microwave photons, are further strongly coupled to phonons. We observe the corresponding polaromechanical normal-mode splitting. By significantly reducing the polariton decay rate via realizing coherent perfect absorption, we achieve a high polaromechanical cooperativity of 9.4 × 10 3 . A quantum cooperativity much greater than unity is achievable at cryogenic temperatures, which would enable various quantum applications. Our results pave the way towards coherent quantum control of photons, magnons and phonons, and are a crucial step for building functional hybrid quantum systems based on magnons. Hybrid quantum systems offer increased functionality, however, they require strong coupling between components. Here, Shen and coauthors achieve strong coupling between polaritons, formed by strongly coupled magnons and photons, and phonons, paving the way for polaromechanical hybrid systems.

Hybrid quantum systems in the ultrastrong, and even more in the deep-strong, coupling regimes can exhibit exotic physical phenomena and promise new applications in quantum technologies. In these nonperturbative regimes, a qubit–resonator system has an entangled quantum vacuum with a nonzero average photon number in the resonator, where the photons are virtual and cannot be directly detected. The vacuum field, however, is able to induce the symmetry breaking of a dispersively coupled probe qubit. We experimentally observe the parity symmetry breaking of an ancillary Xmon artificial atom induced by the field of a lumped-element superconducting resonator deep-strongly coupled with a flux qubit. This result opens a way to experimentally explore the novel quantum-vacuum effects emerging in the deep-strong coupling regime. Hybrid quantum systems, such as superconducting qubits interacting with microwave photons in resonators, offer a rich platform for exploring fundamental physics. Wang et al. observe parity symmetry breaking in a probe qubit dispersively coupled to a resonator in the deep-strong coupling regime.

Exceptional points (EPs) in non-Hermitian systems offer a remarkably strong response to weak perturbations, but the nonorthogonal nature of the corresponding eigenvectors causes noise to diverge, hindering EPs practical application. Here, we report a twelve-fold enhancement of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in magnetic field sensing enabled by a third-order EP of coherent perfect absorption (CPA EP3) in a passive cavity magnonic system. This non-Hermitian magnonic platform comprises two identical yttrium iron garnet (YIG) spheres coherently coupled to a cavity mode, in which the CPA EP3 is realized by engineering the three-mode loss to form a pseudo-Hermitian absorption Hamiltonian. By independently tailoring the absorption EP apart from the resonance EP, the system circumvents the noise divergence caused by eigenbasis collapse. Notably, we harness the sensitivity of the minimum output intensity near CPA to perturbations, yielding a seventy-fold SNR improvement and a 400-fold increase in responsivity compared with non-CPA system. A comprehensive noise analysis over one hundred repeated measurements confirms the suppression of frequency noise near the CPA EP3. This demonstrates that our scheme not only avoids the noise divergence plaguing conventional higher-order EP sensors but also provides a general strategy to exploit both CPA and EP for SNR enhancement in passive non-Hermitian systems. Exceptional points (EPs) in non-Hermitian systems offer a strong response to perturbations, offering a promising platform for sensing. By using a third-order EP of coherent perfect absorption, here, authors demonstrate signal-to-noise ratio enhancement in a passive cavity magnonic system, providing a step forward towards future developments of EP sensing.

The realization of strong nonlinear coupling between single photons has been a long-standing goal in quantum optics and quantum information science, promising wide impact applications, such as all-optical deterministic quantum logic and single-photon frequency conversion. Here, we report an experimental observation of the strong coupling between a single-photon and a two-photon Fock state in an ultrastrongly-coupled circuit-QED system. This strong nonlinear interaction is realized by introducing a detuned flux qubit working as an effective coupler between two modes of a superconducting coplanar waveguide resonator. The ultrastrong light–matter interaction breaks the excitation number conservation, and an external flux bias breaks the parity conservation. The combined effect of the two enables the strong one–two-photon coupling. Quantum Rabi-like avoided crossing is resolved when tuning the two-photon resonance frequency of the first mode across the single-photon resonance frequency of the second mode. Within this new photonic regime, we observe the thresholdless second harmonic generation for a mean photon number below one. Our results represent a key step towards a new regime of quantum nonlinear optics, where individual photons can deterministically and coherently interact with each other in the absence of any stimulating fields. Systems with strong photon-photon interactions enable advanced quantum optical applications as well as the study of highly correlated light-matter states. Here the authors report strong coupling between single- and two-photon states in a superconducting circuit, enabling a new regime of nonlinear quantum optics.

Squeezed states, crucial for quantum metrology and emerging quantum technologies, have been demonstrated in various platforms, but quantum squeezing of magnons in macroscopic spin systems remains elusive. Here we report the experimental observation of quantum-level magnon squeezing in a millimeter-scale yttrium iron garnet (YIG) sphere. By engineering a strong dispersive magnon-superconducting qubit coupling via a microwave cavity, we implement a significant self-Kerr nonlinearity to generate squeezed magnon states with their mean magnon number less than one. Harnessing a magnon-assisted Raman process, we perform Wigner tomography, revealing quadrature variances of ~0.8 (~1.0 dB squeezing) relative to the vacuum. These results lay the groundwork for quantum nonlinear magnonics and promise potential applications in quantum metrology. There has been growing interest in studying magnons in the quantum regime, and coherent coupling to other quantum systems has been demonstrated. Here the authors report quantum level magnon squeezing in a millimeter scale yttrium iron garnet sphere, enabled by strong magnon-superconducting qubit coupling.

Promising applications of the anisotropic quantum Rabi model (AQRM) in broad parameter ranges are explored, which is realized with superconducting flux qubits simultaneously driven by two-tone time-dependent magnetic fields. Regarding the quantum phase transitions (QPTs), with assistance of fidelity susceptibility, we extract the scaling functions and the critical exponents, with which the universal scaling of the cumulant ratio is captured by rescaling the parameters related to the anisotropy. Moreover, a fixed point of the cumulant ratio is predicted at the critical point of the AQRM with finite anisotropy. In respect of quantum information tasks, the generation of the macroscopic Schrödinger cat states and quantum controlled phase gates are investigated in the degenerate case of the AQRM, whose performance is also investigated by numerical calculation with practical parameters. Therefore, our results pave the way to explore distinct features of the AQRM in circuit QED systems for QPTs, quantum simulations and quantum information processing.

Hybridizing collective spin excitations and a cavity with high cooperativity provides a new research subject in the field of cavity quantum electrodynamics and can also have potential applications to quantum information. Here we report an experimental study of cavity quantum electrodynamics with ferromagnetic magnons in a small yttrium-iron-garnet (YIG) sphere at both cryogenic and room temperatures. We observe for the first time a strong coupling of the same cavity mode to both a ferromagnetic-resonance (FMR) mode and a magnetostatic (MS) mode near FMR in the quantum limit. This is achieved at a temperature ~22 mK, where the average microwave photon number in the cavity is less than one. At room temperature, we also observe strong coupling of the cavity mode to the FMR mode in the same YIG sphere and find a slight increase of the damping rate of the FMR mode. These observations reveal the extraordinary robustness of the FMR mode against temperature. However, the MS mode becomes unobservable at room temperature in the measured transmission spectrum of the microwave cavity containing the YIG sphere. Our numerical simulations show that this is due to a drastic increase of the damping rate of the MS mode. Quantum electrodynamics: Physics with a crystal ball New research unveils quantum-coherence properties of ferromagnetic magnons in a magnetic sphere at both cryogenic and room temperatures. Tie-Fu Li and J. Q. You from the Beijing Computational Science Research Center, along with collaborators in China, Japan and the USA, placed a submillimeter yttrium-iron-garnet (YIG) sphere within a three-dimensional microwave cavity. They observed a strong interaction between the ferromagnetic resonances of the small magnetic sphere and photons in the surrounding cavity, and confirmed that single photons in the cavity showed strong and robust coupling with the collective spin excitations of magnetic YIG. The coupling extended from cryogenic temperatures up to room temperature, emphasizing the considerable practical potential of this system. These findings remind us that the interaction of different quantum systems can lead to properties unknown to classical systems, revealing potential practical applications.