2006/12/08 by Sergio O. Valenzuela, S. O. Valenzuela, W. D. Oliver +9 · 3 citations
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Quantum Information and Cryptography #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #cond-mat.supr-con
paper · pdf · doi:10.1126/science.1134008
published as Science 314, 1589 (2006) · Comments Article plus Supplementary Online Material. 19 pages, 6 figures
openalex publication_date 2006/12/08 · arxiv created 2007/02/08 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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 approximately 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.