Nonreciprocal devices perform crucial functions in many low-noise quantum measurements, usually by exploiting magnetic effects. In the proof-of-principle device presented here, on the other hand, two on-chip coupled Josephson parametric converters (JPCs) achieve directionality by exploiting the nonreciprocal phase response of the JPC in the transmission-gain mode. The nonreciprocity of the device is controlled in situ by varying the amplitude and phase difference of two independent microwave pump tones feeding the system. At the desired working point and for a signal frequency of 8.453 GHz, the device achieves a forward power gain of 15 dB within a dynamical bandwidth of 9 MHz, a reverse gain of $-6\mathrm{dB}$, and suppression of the reflected signal by 8 dB. We also find that the amplifier adds a noise equivalent to less than 1.5 photons at the signal frequency (referred back to the input). It can process up to 3 photons at the signal frequency per inverse dynamical bandwidth. With a directional amplifier operating along the principles of this device, qubit and readout preamplifier could be integrated on the same chip.

We describe a many-body quantum system that can be made to quantum compute by the adiabatic application of a large applied field to the system. Prior to the application of the field, quantum information is localized on one boundary of the device, and after the application of the field, this information propagates to the other side of the device, with a quantum circuit applied to the information. The applied circuit depends on the many-body Hamiltonian of the material, and the computation takes place in a degenerate ground space with symmetry-protected topological order. Such “adiabatic quantum transistors” are universal adiabatic quantum computing devices that have the added benefit of being modular. Here, we describe this model, provide arguments for why it is an efficient model of quantum computing, and examine these many-body systems in the presence of a noisy environment.

We demonstrate a fully cryogenic microwave feedback network composed of modular superconducting devices connected by transmission lines and designed to control a mechanical oscillator that is coupled to one of the devices. The network features an electromechanical device and a tunable controller that coherently receives, processes, and feeds back continuous microwave signals that modify the dynamics and readout of the mechanical state. While previous electromechanical systems represent some compromise between efficient control and efficient readout of the mechanical state, as set by the electromagnetic decay rate, the tunable controller produces a closed-loop network that can be dynamically and continuously tuned between both extremes much faster than the mechanical response time. We demonstrate that the microwave decay rate may be modulated by at least a factor of 10 at a rate greater than ${10}^4$ times the mechanical response rate. The system is easy to build and suggests that some useful functions may arise most naturally at the network level of modular, quantum electromagnetic devices.

Making a system state follow a prescribed trajectory despite fluctuations and errors commonly consists of monitoring an observable (temperature, blood-glucose level, etc.) and reacting on its controllers (heater power, insulin amount, etc.). In the quantum domain, there is a change of paradigm in feedback, since measurements modify the state of the system, most dramatically when the trajectory goes through superpositions of measurement eigenstates. Here, we demonstrate the stabilization of an arbitrary trajectory of a superconducting qubit by measurement-based feedback. The protocol benefits from the long coherence time ($T_2>10\mu \mathrm{s}$) of the 3D transmon qubit, the high efficiency ($82\%$) of the phase-preserving Josephson amplifier, and fast electronics that ensure less than 500 ns total delay. At discrete time intervals, the state of the qubit is measured and corrected in case an error is detected. For Rabi oscillations, where the discrete measurements occur when the qubit is supposed to be in the measurement pointer states, we demonstrate an average fidelity of $85\%$ to the targeted trajectory. For Ramsey oscillations, which do not go through pointer states, the average fidelity reaches $76\%$. Incidentally, we demonstrate a fast reset protocol that allows us to cool a 3D transmon qubit down to $0.6\%$ in the excited state.

Shallow group-V donors in silicon may be thought of as hydrogenlike, and shallow acceptors are similarly described by effective-mass theory with similar energy scales, which implies that donor and acceptor excitations should be just as long-lived. Yet, spectral widths of acceptors are considerably wider. We have measured the orbital dynamics of acceptors in silicon using time-domain spectroscopy with a free-electron laser. Both the population and coherence lifetimes for acceptors in natural silicon are substantially longer—e.g. approximately 60 ps for boron—than implied by the spectral linewidths; our experiments also establish the recombination time for ionized acceptors to be, at approximately 500 ps, nearly an order of magnitude longer. We show that there are no extra sources of decoherence introduced by the host crystal, other than the population relaxation. In this sense, the crystal acts as an atom trap, and, by introducing quantum coherent control of acceptors to that previously established for donors, we open the way to optically controllable nanoscale p-n devices.

We implement a double-pixel compressive-sensing camera to efficiently characterize, at high resolution, the spatially entangled fields that are produced by spontaneous parametric down-conversion. This technique leverages sparsity in spatial correlations between entangled photons to improve acquisition times over raster scanning by a scaling factor up to $n^2/\log (n)$ for $n$-dimensional images. We image at resolutions up to 1024 dimensions per detector and demonstrate a channel capacity of 8.4 bits per photon. By comparing the entangled photons’ classical mutual information in conjugate bases, we violate an entropic Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen separability criterion for all measured resolutions. More broadly, our result indicates that compressive sensing can be especially effective for higher-order measurements on correlated systems.

The conflict between classical and quantum physics can be identified through a series of yes-no tests on quantum systems, without it being necessary that these systems be in special quantum states. Kochen-Specker (KS) sets of yes-no tests have this property and provide a quantum-versus-classical advantage that is free of the initialization problem that affects some quantum computers. Here, we report the first experimental implementation of a complete KS set that consists of 18 yes-no tests on four-dimensional quantum systems and show how to use the KS set to obtain a state-independent quantum advantage. We first demonstrate the unique power of this KS set for solving a task while avoiding the problem of state initialization. Such a demonstration is done by showing that, for 28 different quantum states encoded in the orbital-angular-momentum and polarization degrees of freedom of single photons, the KS set provides an impossible-to-beat solution. In a second experiment, we generate maximally contextual quantum correlations by performing compatible sequential measurements of the polarization and path of single photons. In this case, state independence is demonstrated for 15 different initial states. Maximum contextuality and state independence follow from the fact that the sequences of measurements project any initial quantum state onto one of the KS set’s eigenstates. Our results show that KS sets can be used for quantum-information processing and quantum computation and pave the way for future developments.

We propose families of protocols for magic-state distillation—important components of fault-tolerance schemes—for systems of odd prime dimension. Our protocols utilize quantum Reed-Muller codes with transversal non-Clifford gates. We find that, in higher dimensions, small and effective codes can be used that have no direct analogue in qubit (two-dimensional) systems. We present several concrete protocols, including schemes for three-dimensional (qutrit) and five-dimensional (ququint) systems. The five-dimensional protocol is, by many measures, the best magic-state-distillation scheme yet discovered. It excels both in terms of error threshold with respect to depolarizing noise ($36.3\%$) and the efficiency measure known as yield, where, for a large region of parameters, it outperforms its qubit counterpart by many orders of magnitude.

We report cooling of a single neutral atom to its three-dimensional vibrational ground state in an optical tweezer. After employing Raman sideband cooling for tens of milliseconds, we measure via sideband spectroscopy a three-dimensional ground-state occupation of about $90\%$. We further observe coherent control of the spin and motional state of the trapped atom. Our demonstration shows that an optical tweezer, formed simply by a tightly focused beam of light, creates sufficient confinement for efficient sideband cooling. This source of ground-state neutral atoms will be instrumental in numerous quantum simulation and logic applications that require a versatile platform for storing and manipulating ultracold single neutral atoms. For example, these results will improve current optical-tweezer experiments studying atom-photon coupling and Rydberg quantum logic gates, and could provide new opportunities such as rapid production of single dipolar molecules or quantum simulation in tweezer arrays.

Quantum key distribution (QKD) uniquely allows the distribution of cryptographic keys with security verified by quantum mechanical limits. Both protocol execution and subsequent applications require the assistance of classical data communication channels. While using separate fibers is one option, it is economically more viable if data and quantum signals are simultaneously transmitted through a single fiber. However, noise-photon contamination arising from the intense data signal has severely restricted both the QKD distances and secure key rates. Here, we exploit a novel temporal-filtering effect for noise-photon rejection. This allows high-bit-rate QKD over fibers up to 90 km in length and populated with error-free bidirectional $\mathrm{Gb}/\mathrm{s}$ data communications. With a high-bit rate and range sufficient for important information infrastructures, such as smart cities and 10-Gbit Ethernet, QKD is a significant step closer toward wide-scale deployment in fiber networks.

A number of authors have suggested that nonlinear interactions can enhance resolution of phase shifts beyond the usual Heisenberg scaling of $1/n$, where $n$ is a measure of resources such as the number of subsystems of the probe state or the mean photon number of the probe state. These suggestions are based on calculations of “local precision” for particular nonlinear schemes. However, we show that there is no simple connection between the local precision and the average estimation error for these schemes, leading to a scaling puzzle. This puzzle is partially resolved by a careful analysis of iterative implementations of the suggested nonlinear schemes. However, it is shown that the suggested nonlinear schemes are still limited to an exponential scaling in $\sqrt{n}$. (This scaling may be compared to the exponential scaling in $n$ which is achievable if multiple passes are allowed, even for linear schemes.) The question of whether nonlinear schemes may have a scaling advantage in the presence of loss is left open. Our results are based on a new bound for average estimation error that depends on (i) an entropic measure of the degree to which the probe state can encode a reference phase value, called the $G$ asymmetry, and (ii) any prior information about the phase shift. This bound is asymptotically stronger than bounds based on the variance of the phase-shift generator. The $G$ asymmetry is also shown to directly bound the average information gained per estimate. Our results hold for any prior distribution of the shift parameter, and generalize to estimates of any shift generated by an operator with discrete eigenvalues.

Many quantum systems are being investigated in the hope of building a large-scale quantum computer. All of these systems suffer from decoherence, resulting in errors during the execution of quantum gates. Quantum error correction enables reliable quantum computation given unreliable hardware. Unoptimized topological quantum error correction (TQEC), while still effective, performs very suboptimally, especially at low error rates. Hand optimizing the classical processing associated with a TQEC scheme for a specific system to achieve better error tolerance can be extremely laborious. We describe a tool, Autotune, capable of performing this optimization automatically, and give two highly distinct examples of its use and extreme outperformance of unoptimized TQEC. Autotune is designed to facilitate the precise study of real hardware running TQEC, with every quantum gate having a realistic, physics-based error model.

Quantum mechanics is potentially advantageous for certain information-processing tasks, but its probabilistic nature and requirement of measurement backaction often limit the precision of conventional classical information-processing devices, such as sensors and atomic clocks. Here we show that, by engineering the dynamics of coupled quantum systems, it is possible to construct a subsystem that evades the measurement backaction of quantum mechanics, at all times of interest, and obeys any classical dynamics, linear or nonlinear, that we choose. We call such a system a quantum-mechanics-free subsystem (QMFS). All of the observables of a QMFS are quantum-nondemolition (QND) observables; moreover, they are dynamical QND observables, thus demolishing the widely held belief that QND observables are constants of motion. QMFSs point to a new strategy for designing classical information-processing devices in regimes where quantum noise is detrimental, unifying previous approaches that employ QND observables, backaction evasion, and quantum noise cancellation. Potential applications include gravitational-wave detection, optomechanical-force sensing, atomic magnetometry, and classical computing. Demonstrations of dynamical QMFSs include the generation of broadband squeezed light for use in interferometric gravitational-wave detection, experiments using entangled atomic-spin ensembles, and implementations of the quantum Toffoli gate.

We develop a layered quantum-computer architecture, which is a systematic framework for tackling the individual challenges of developing a quantum computer while constructing a cohesive device design. We discuss many of the prominent techniques for implementing circuit-model quantum computing and introduce several new methods, with an emphasis on employing surface-code quantum error correction. In doing so, we propose a new quantum-computer architecture based on optical control of quantum dots. The time scales of physical-hardware operations and logical, error-corrected quantum gates differ by several orders of magnitude. By dividing functionality into layers, we can design and analyze subsystems independently, demonstrating the value of our layered architectural approach. Using this concrete hardware platform, we provide resource analysis for executing fault-tolerant quantum algorithms for integer factoring and quantum simulation, finding that the quantum-dot architecture we study could solve such problems on the time scale of days.

Demonstrating nonclassical effects over longer and longer distances is essential for both quantum technology and fundamental science. The main challenge is the loss of photons during propagation, because considering only those cases where photons are detected opens a “detection loophole” in security whenever parties or devices are untrusted. Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen steering is equivalent to an entanglement-verification task in which one party (device) is untrusted. We derive arbitrarily loss-tolerant tests, enabling us to perform a detection-loophole-free demonstration of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen steering with parties separated by a coiled 1-km-long optical fiber, with a total loss of 8.9 dB (87%).

We study the spin and orbital dynamics of single nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond between room temperature and 700 K. We find that the ability to optically address and coherently control single spins above room temperature is limited by nonradiative processes that quench the NV center’s fluorescence-based spin readout between 550 and 700 K. Combined with electronic structure calculations, our measurements indicate that the energy difference between the ${}^{3}E$ and ${}^{1}A_1$ electronic states is approximately 0.8 eV. We also demonstrate that the inhomogeneous spin lifetime ($T_2^{*}$) is temperature independent up to at least 625 K, suggesting that single NV centers could be applied as nanoscale thermometers over a broad temperature range.

The ability to coherently spectrally manipulate quantum information has the potential to improve qubit rates across quantum channels and find applications in optical quantum computing. In this paper, we present experiments that use a multielement solenoid combined with the three-level gradient echo memory scheme to perform precision spectral manipulation of optical pulses. These operations include separate bandwidth and frequency manipulation with precision down to tens of kHz, spectral filtering of up to three separate frequency components, as well as time-delayed interference between pulses with both the same, and different, frequencies. If applied in a quantum information network, these operations would enable frequency-based multiplexing of qubits.

A loophole-free violation of Bell inequalities is of fundamental importance for demonstrating quantum nonlocality and long-distance device-independent secure communication. However, transmission losses represent a fundamental limitation for photonic loophole-free Bell tests. A local precertification of the presence of the photons immediately before the local measurements may solve this problem. We show that local precertification is feasible by integrating three current technologies: (i) enhanced single-photon down-conversion to locally create a flag photon, (ii) nanowire-based superconducting single-photon detectors for a fast flag detection, and (iii) superconducting transition-edge sensors to close the detection loophole. We carry out a precise space-time analysis of the proposed scheme, showing its viability and feasibility.

We propose a compact single-plasmon source operating at near-infrared wavelengths on an integrated III-V semiconductor platform, with a thin ridge waveguide serving as the plasmon channel. By attaching an ultrasmall cavity to the channel, it is shown that both the plasmon-generation efficiency ($\beta$) and the spontaneous decay rate into the channel can be significantly enhanced. An analytical model derived with the Lorentz reciprocity theorem captures the main physics involved in the design of the source and yields results in good agreement with fully vectorial simulations of the device. At resonance, it is predicted that the ultrasmall cavity increases the $\beta$ factor by 70% and boosts the spontaneous decay rate by a factor of 20. The proposed design could pave the way toward integrated and scalable plasmonic quantum networks. Comparison of the present design with other fully dielectric competing approaches is addressed.

We propose a method to get experimental access to the physics of the ultrastrong- and deep-strong-coupling regimes of light-matter interaction through the quantum simulation of their dynamics in standard circuit QED. The method makes use of a two-tone driving scheme, using state-of-the-art circuit-QED technology, and can be easily extended to general cavity-QED setups. We provide examples of ultrastrong- and deep-strong-coupling quantum effects that would be otherwise inaccessible.