- Physical Review Journals
All JournalsPhysics Magazine

Physical Review Research

Reuse & Permissions

It is not necessary to obtain permission to reuse this article or its components as it is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI are maintained. Please note that some figures may have been included with permission from other third parties. It is your responsibility to obtain the proper permission from the rights holder directly for these figures.

Export citation

Export citation

Choose format for download:

Download Citation
  • Letter
  • Open Access

Tunneling spectroscopy in superconducting circuit lattices

Botao Du*, Qihao Guo, Santiago López, and Ruichao Ma†

  • *Contact author: du245@purdue.edu
  • †Contact author: maruichao@purdue.edu
PDF

Phys. Rev. Research 7, L022038 – Published 19 May, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.7.L022038

Abstract

We demonstrate tunneling spectroscopy of synthetic quantum matter in superconducting circuit lattices. We measure site-resolved excitation spectra by coupling the lattice to engineered driven-dissipative particle baths that serve as local tunneling probes. Using incoherent particle source and drain, we independently extract quasiparticle and quasihole spectra and reconstruct the spatial structure of collective excitations. We perform spectroscopy of a strongly interacting Bose-Hubbard lattice to measure changes in energy spectra for superfluid and Mott-insulator states at different densities and observe the effects of three-body interactions. Our results provide a toolset for characterizing many-body states in analog quantum simulators.

View figure in article

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Article Text

Supplemental Material

References (42)

  1. C. J. Chen, Introduction to Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007).
  2. Ø. Fischer, M. Kugler, I. Maggio-Aprile, C. Berthod, and C. Renner, Scanning tunneling spectroscopy of high-temperature superconductors, Rev. Mod. Phys. 79, 353 (2007).
  3. E. L. Wolf, Principles of Electron Tunneling Spectroscopy, 2nd ed., International Series of Monographs on Physics (Oxford University Press, London, 2011).
  4. Z. Qiu, M. Holwill, T. Olsen, P. Lyu, J. Li, H. Fang, H. Yang, M. Kashchenko, K. S. Novoselov, and J. Lu, Visualizing atomic structure and magnetism of 2D magnetic insulators via tunneling through graphene, Nat. Commun. 12, 70 (2021).
  5. J.-X. Yin, S. H. Pan, and M. Zahid Hasan, Probing topological quantum matter with scanning tunnelling microscopy, Nat. Rev. Phys. 3, 249 (2021).
  6. C. Kollath, M. Köhl, and T. Giamarchi, Scanning tunneling microscopy for ultracold atoms, Phys. Rev. A 76, 063602 (2007).
  7. A. Kantian, U. Schollwöck, and T. Giamarchi, Lattice-Assisted spectroscopy: A generalized scanning tunneling microscope for ultracold atoms, Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 165301 (2015).
  8. D. Gruss, C.-C. Chien, J. T. Barreiro, M. Di Ventra, and M. Zwolak, An energy-resolved atomic scanning probe, New J. Phys. 20, 115005 (2018).
  9. S. N. M. Paladugu, T. Chen, F. A. An, B. Yan, and B. Gadway, Injection spectroscopy of momentum state lattices, Commun. Phys. 7, 39 (2024).
  10. A. Blais, R.-S. Huang, A. Wallraff, S. M. Girvin, and R. J. Schoelkopf, Cavity quantum electrodynamics for superconducting electrical circuits: An architecture for quantum computation, Phys. Rev. A 69, 062320 (2004).
  11. A. A. Houck, H. E. Türeci, and J. Koch, On-chip quantum simulation with superconducting circuits, Nat. Phys. 8, 292 (2012).
  12. I. Carusotto, A. A. Houck, A. J. Kollár, P. Roushan, D. I. Schuster, and J. Simon, Photonic materials in circuit quantum electrodynamics, Nat. Phys. 16, 268 (2020).
  13. R. Ma, C. Owens, A. LaChapelle, D. I. Schuster, and J. Simon, Hamiltonian tomography of photonic lattices, Phys. Rev. A 95, 062120 (2017).
  14. C. Owens, A. LaChapelle, B. Saxberg, B. M. Anderson, R. Ma, J. Simon, and D. I. Schuster, Quarter-flux Hofstadter lattice in a qubit-compatible microwave cavity array, Phys. Rev. A 97, 013818 (2018).
  15. M. Fitzpatrick, N. M. Sundaresan, A. C. Y. Li, J. Koch, and A. A. Houck, Observation of a dissipative phase transition in a one-dimensional circuit QED lattice, Phys. Rev. X 7, 011016 (2017).
  16. G. P. Fedorov, S. V. Remizov, D. S. Shapiro, W. V. Pogosov, E. Egorova, I. Tsitsilin, M. Andronik, A. A. Dobronosova, I. A. Rodionov, O. V. Astafiev, and A. V. Ustinov, Photon transport in a Bose-Hubbard chain of superconducting artificial atoms, Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 180503 (2021).
  17. P. Roushan, C. Neill, J. Tangpanitanon, V. M. Bastidas, A. Megrant, R. Barends, Y. Chen, Z. Chen, B. Chiaro, A. Dunsworth et al. Spectroscopic signatures of localization with interacting photons in superconducting qubits, Science 358, 1175 (2017).
  18. G. Roberts, A. Vrajitoarea, B. Saxberg, M. G. Panetta, J. Simon, and D. I. Schuster, Manybody interferometry of quantum fluids, Sci. Adv. 10, eado1069 (2024).
  19. B. Du, R. Suresh, S. López, J. Cadiente, and R. Ma, Probing site-resolved current in strongly interacting superconducting circuit lattices, Phys. Rev. Lett. 133, 060601 (2024).
  20. See Supplemental Material at http://link.aps.org/supplemental/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.7.L022038 for device parameters, modeling, and additional analysis, which includes Refs. [39, 40, 41, 42].
  21. J. Koch, T. M. Yu, J. Gambetta, A. A. Houck, D. I. Schuster, J. Majer, A. Blais, M. H. Devoret, S. M. Girvin, and R. J. Schoelkopf, Charge-insensitive qubit design derived from the Cooper pair box, Phys. Rev. A 76, 042319 (2007).
  22. A. H. Karamlou, I. T. Rosen, S. E. Muschinske, C. N. Barrett, A. Di Paolo, L. Ding, P. M. Harrington, M. Hays, R. Das, D. K. Kim et al. Probing entanglement in a 2D hard-core Bose-Hubbard lattice, Nature (London) 629, 561 (2024).
  23. B. Saxberg, A. Vrajitoarea, G. Roberts, M. G. Panetta, J. Simon, and D. I. Schuster, Disorder-assisted assembly of strongly correlated fluids of light, Nature (London) 612, 435 (2022).
  24. S. Ejima, H. Fehske, and F. Gebhard, Dynamic properties of the one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model, Europhys. Lett. 93, 30002 (2011).
  25. O. Mansikkamäki, S. Laine, A. Piltonen, and M. Silveri, Beyond hard-core bosons in transmon arrays, PRX Quantum 3, 040314 (2022).
  26. L. Cardarelli, S. Greschner, and L. Santos, Engineering interactions and anyon statistics by multicolor lattice-depth modulations, Phys. Rev. A 94, 023615 (2016).
  27. A. J. Daley and J. Simon, Effective three-body interactions via photon-assisted tunneling in an optical lattice, Phys. Rev. A 89, 053619 (2014).
  28. A. Blais, A. L. Grimsmo, S. M. Girvin, and A. Wallraff, Circuit quantum electrodynamics, Rev. Mod. Phys. 93, 025005 (2021).
  29. D. A. Abanin, E. Altman, I. Bloch, and M. Serbyn, Colloquium: Many-body localization, thermalization, and entanglement, Rev. Mod. Phys. 91, 021001 (2019).
  30. K. Agarwal, E. Altman, E. Demler, S. Gopalakrishnan, D. A. Huse, and M. Knap, Rare-region effects and dynamics near the many-body localization transition, Ann. Phys. 529, 1600326 (2017).
  31. S. de Léséleuc, V. Lienhard, P. Scholl, D. Barredo, S. Weber, N. Lang, H. P. Büchler, T. Lahaye, and A. Browaeys, Observation of a symmetry-protected topological phase of interacting bosons with Rydberg atoms, Science 365, 775 (2019).
  32. J. C. Owens, M. G. Panetta, B. Saxberg, G. Roberts, S. Chakram, R. Ma, A. Vrajitoarea, J. Simon, and D. I. Schuster, Chiral cavity quantum electrodynamics, Nat. Phys. 18, 1048 (2022).
  33. B. Blain, G. Marchegiani, J. Polo, G. Catelani, and L. Amico, Soliton versus single-photon quantum dynamics in arrays of superconducting qubits, Phys. Rev. Res. 5, 033130 (2023).
  34. J. P. T. Stenger, G. Ben-Shach, D. Pekker, and N. T. Bronn, Simulating spectroscopy experiments with a superconducting quantum computer, Phys. Rev. Res. 4, 043106 (2022).
  35. K. Zawadzki and A. E. Feiguin, Time- and momentum-resolved tunneling spectroscopy of pump-driven nonthermal excitations in Mott insulators, Phys. Rev. B 100, 195124 (2019).
  36. R. Ma, B. Saxberg, C. Owens, N. Leung, Y. Lu, J. Simon, and D. I. Schuster, A dissipatively stabilized Mott insulator of photons, Nature (London) 566, 51 (2019).
  37. R. O. Umucalılar and I. Carusotto, Generation and spectroscopic signatures of a fractional quantum Hall liquid of photons in an incoherently pumped optical cavity, Phys. Rev. A 96, 053808 (2017).
  38. J. Lebreuilly and I. Carusotto, Quantum simulation of zero-temperature quantum phases and incompressible states of light via non-Markovian reservoir engineering techniques, C. R. Phys. 19, 433 (2018).
  39. X. Y. Jin, A. Kamal, A. P. Sears, T. Gudmundsen, D. Hover, J. Miloshi, R. Slattery, F. Yan, J. Yoder, T. P. Orlando, S. Gustavsson, and W. D. Oliver, Thermal and residual excited-state population in a 3D transmon qubit, Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 240501 (2015).
  40. J. D. Strand, M. Ware, F. Beaudoin, T. A. Ohki, B. R. Johnson, A. Blais, and B. L. T. Plourde, First-order sideband transitions with flux-driven asymmetric transmon qubits, Phys. Rev. B 87, 220505 (2013).
  41. A. Pocklington, Y.-X. Wang, Y. Yanay, and A. A. Clerk, Stabilizing volume-law entangled states of fermions and qubits using local dissipation, Phys. Rev. B 105, L140301 (2022).
  42. P. Groszkowski and J. Koch, Scqubits: A Python package for superconducting qubits, Quantum 5, 583 (2021).

Outline

Information

Phys. Rev. Research 7, L022038– Published 19 May, 2025
  • Received 21 November 2024
  • Accepted 9 May 2025
Crossmark - Check for updates button
Creative Commons Logo

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

Published by the American Physical Society

Sign In to Your Journals Account

Filter

Filter

Article Lookup

Enter a citation