Observation of Berry's Phase in a Solid State Qubit

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the controlled accumulation of Berry's geometric phase in a superconducting qubit, showing potential for fault-tolerant quantum information processing through geometric phase manipulation.

Contribution

It experimentally observes Berry's phase in a solid-state qubit using microwave control, confirming theoretical predictions and exploring geometry-dependent dephasing effects.

Findings

Berry's phase observed in superconducting qubit

Excellent agreement with theoretical predictions

Geometry-dependent dephasing observed

Abstract

In quantum information science, the phase of a wavefunction plays an important role in encoding information. While most experiments in this field rely on dynamic effects to manipulate this information, an alternative approach is to use geometric phase, which has been argued to have potential fault tolerance. We demonstrate the controlled accumulation of a geometric phase, Berry's phase, in a superconducting qubit, manipulating the qubit geometrically using microwave radiation, and observing the accumulated phase in an interference experiment. We find excellent agreement with Berry's predictions, and also observe a geometry dependent contribution to dephasing.