2008/05/11 by David M. Berns, Mark S. Rudner, Sergio O. Valenzuela +4 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.supr-con
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/nature07262
published as Nature 455, 51 (2008) · 12 pages, 13 figures
arxiv created 2008/05/11 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
The energy-level structure of a quantum system plays a fundamental role in determining its behavior and manifests itself in a discrete absorption and emission spectrum. Conventionally, spectra are probed via frequency spectroscopy whereby the frequency νof a harmonic driving field is varied to fulfill the conditions ΔE = h ν, where the driving field is resonant with the level separation ΔE (h is Planck's constant). Although this technique has been successfully employed in a variety of physical systems, including natural and artificial atoms and molecules, its application is not universally straightforward, and becomes extremely challenging for frequencies in the range of 10's and 100's of gigahertz. Here we demonstrate an alternative approach, whereby a harmonic driving field sweeps the atom through its energy-level avoided crossings at a fixed frequency, surmounting many of the limitations of the conventional approach. Spectroscopic information is obtained from the amplitude dependence of the system response. The resulting ``spectroscopy diamonds'' contain interference patterns and population inversion that serve as a fingerprint of the atom's spectrum. By analyzing these features, we determine the energy spectrum of a manifold of states with energies from 0.01 to 120 GHz × h in a superconducting artificial atom, using a driving frequency near 0.1 GHz. This approach provides a means to manipulate and characterize systems over a broad bandwidth, using only a single driving frequency that may be orders of magnitude smaller than the energy scales being probed.