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.
@article{arxiv.1308.2208,
title = {Quantum nondemolition detection of a propagating microwave photon},
author = {Sankar R. Sathyamoorthy and L. Tornberg and Anton F. Kockum and Ben Q. Baragiola and Joshua Combes and C. M. Wilson and Thomas M. Stace and G. Johansson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1308.2208},
year = {2014}
}