2013/08/31 by Sankar R. Sathyamoorthy, L. Tornberg, Anton F. Kockum +5 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #quant-ph #cond-mat.mes-hall
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.112.093601
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 093601 (2014)
arxiv created 2013/12/19 · arxiv updated 2014/03/21
The ability to nondestructively detect the presence of a single, traveling photon has been a long-standing goal in optics, with applications in quantum information and measurement. Realising such a detector is complicated by the fact that photon-photon interactions are typically very weak. At microwave frequencies, very strong effective photon-photon interactions in a waveguide have recently been demonstrated. Here we show how this type of interaction can be used to realize a quantum nondemolition measurement of a single propagating microwave photon. The scheme we propose uses a chain of solid-state 3-level systems (transmons), cascaded through circulators which suppress photon backscattering. Our theoretical analysis shows that microwave-photon detection with fidelity around 90% can be realized with existing technologies.