title: Quantum engineering. Confining the state of light to a quantum manifold by engineered two-photon loss.
abstract: Physical systems usually exhibit quantum behavior, such as superpositions and entanglement, only when they are sufficiently decoupled from a lossy environment. Paradoxically, a specially engineered interaction with the environment can become a resource for the generation and protection of quantum states. This notion can be generalized to the confinement of a system into a manifold of quantum states, consisting of all coherent superpositions of multiple stable steady states. We have confined the state of a superconducting resonator to the quantum manifold spanned by two coherent states of opposite phases and have observed a Schrödinger cat state spontaneously squeeze out of vacuum before decaying into a classical mixture. This experiment points toward robustly encoding quantum information in multidimensional steady-state manifolds.
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Physics, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA. zaki.leghtas@yale.edu.
authors.forename: Z
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Leghtas
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Physics, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.
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authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Touzard
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Physics, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.
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authors.initials: IM
authors.lastname: Pop
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Physics, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.
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authors.lastname: Kou
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Physics, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.
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authors.lastname: Vlastakis
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Physics, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.
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authors.lastname: Petrenko
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Physics, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.
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authors.initials: KM
authors.lastname: Sliwa
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Physics, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.
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authors.lastname: Narla
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Physics, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.
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authors.lastname: Shankar
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Physics, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.
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authors.lastname: Hatridge
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Physics, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.
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authors.lastname: Reagor
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Physics, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.
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authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Frunzio
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Physics, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.
authors.forename: R J
authors.initials: RJ
authors.lastname: Schoelkopf
authors.affiliation: Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA) Paris-Rocquencourt, Domaine de Voluceau, B.P. 105, 78153 Le Chesnay Cedex, France. Department of Applied Physics, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Mirrahimi
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Physics, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.
authors.forename: M H
authors.initials: MH
authors.lastname: Devoret