A Schrodinger Cat Living in Two Boxes
Abstract
Quantum superpositions of distinct coherent states in a single-mode harmonic oscillator, known as "cat states", have been an elegant demonstration of Schrodinger's famous cat paradox. Here, we realize a two-mode cat state of electromagnetic fields in two microwave cavities bridged by a superconducting artificial atom, which can also be viewed as an entangled pair of single-cavity cat states. We present full quantum state tomography of this complex cat state over a Hilbert space exceeding 100 dimensions via quantum non-demolition measurements of the joint photon number parity. The ability to manipulate such multi-cavity quantum states paves the way for logical operations between redundantly encoded qubits for fault-tolerant quantum computation and communication.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1601.05505,
title = {A Schrodinger Cat Living in Two Boxes},
author = {Chen Wang and Yvonne Y. Gao and Philip Reinhold and R. W. Heeres and Nissim Ofek and Kevin Chou and Christopher Axline and Matthew Reagor and Jacob Blumoff and K. M. Sliwa and L. Frunzio and S. M. Girvin and Liang Jiang and M. Mirrahimi and M. H. Devoret and R. J. Schoelkopf},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1601.05505},
year = {2016}
}