Signatures of Hong-Ou-Mandel Interference at Microwave Frequencies

Two-photon quantum interference at a beam splitter, commonly known as Hong-Ou-Mandel interference, was recently demonstrated with \emph{microwave-frequency} photons by Lang \emph{et al.}\,\cite{lang:microwaveHOM}. This experiment employed circuit QED systems as sources of microwave photons, and was based on the measurement of second-order cross-correlation and auto-correlation functions of the microwave fields at the outputs of the beam splitter. Here we present the calculation of these correlation functions for the cases of inputs corresponding to: (i) trains of \emph{pulsed} Gaussian or Lorentzian single microwave photons, and (ii) resonant fluorescent microwave fields from \emph{continuously-driven} circuit QED systems. The calculations include the effects of the finite bandwidth of the detection scheme. In both cases, the signature of two-photon quantum interference is a suppression of the second-order cross-correlation function for small delays. The experiment described in Ref. \onlinecite{lang:microwaveHOM} was performed with trains of \emph{Lorentzian} single photons, and very good agreement between the calculations and the experimental data was obtained.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figure

Experimental Monte Carlo Quantum Process Certification

Experimental implementations of quantum information processing have now reached a level of sophistication where quantum process tomography is impractical. The number of experimental settings as well as the computational cost of the data post-processing now translates to days of effort to characterize even experiments with as few as 8 qubits. Recently a more practical approach to determine the fidelity of an experimental quantum process has been proposed, where the experimental data is compared directly to an ideal process using Monte Carlo sampling. Here we present an experimental implementation of this scheme in a circuit quantum electrodynamics setup to determine the fidelity of two qubit gates, such as the cphase and the cnot gate, and three qubit gates, such as the Toffoli gate and two sequential cphase gates

Observation of topological Uhlmann phases with superconducting qubits

Topological insulators and superconductors at finite temperature can be characterized by the topological Uhlmann phase. However, a direct experimental measurement of this invariant has remained elusive in condensed matter systems. Here, we report a measurement of the topological Uhlmann phase for a topological insulator simulated by a system of entangled qubits in the IBM Quantum Experience platform. By making use of ancilla states, otherwise unobservable phases carrying topological information about the system become accessible, enabling the experimental determination of a complete phase diagram including environmental effects. We employ a state-independent measurement protocol which does not involve prior knowledge of the system state. The proposed measurement scheme is extensible to interacting particles and topological models with a large number of bands.Comment: RevTex4 file, color figure