Chiral quantum state circulation from photon lattice topology

Chiral quantum state circulation is the unidirectional transfer of a quantum state from one subsystem to the next. It is essential to the working of a quantum computer; for instance, for state preparation and isolation. We propose a cavity-QED architecture consisting of three cavities coupled to a qubit, in which \emph{any} photonic state of cavity 1 with sufficiently many photons circulates to cavity 2 after a fixed time interval, and then to cavity 3 and back to 1. Cavity-state circulation arises from topologically protected chiral boundary states in the associated photon lattice and is thus robust to perturbation. We compute the circulation period in the semi-classical limit, demonstrate that circulation persists for time-scales diverging with the total photon number, and provide a Floquet protocol to engineer the desired Hamiltonian. Superconducting qubits offer an ideal platform to build and test these devices in the near term.