2014/03/31 by Bixuan Fan, Göran Johansson, Joshua Combes +2 · 41 citations
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Coherence (philosophical gambling strategy) #Detector #Mechanical and Optical Resonators #Microwave #Optics #Optoelectronics #Photon #Photonics #Physics #Quantum #Quantum Information and Cryptography #Quantum decoherence #Quantum mechanics #Quantum optics and atomic interactions #Qubit #Resonator #Transmon #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.90.035132
published in Physical Review B 90(3) (American Physical Society)
arxiv created 2014/05/06 · openalex publication_date 2014/07/25 · arxiv updated 2014/08/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Detecting an itinerant microwave photon with high efficiency is an outstanding problem in microwave photonics and its applications. We present a scheme to detect an itinerant microwave photon in a transmission line via the nonlinearity provided by a transmon in a driven microwave resonator. With a single transmon we achieve 84% distinguishability between zero and one microwave photons and 90% distinguishability with two cascaded transmons by performing continuous measurements on the output field of the resonator. We also show how the measurement diminishes coherence in the photon number basis thereby illustrating a fundamental principle of quantum measurement: The decoherence rate increases as the detector is made more effective.