Waveguide Bandgap Engineering with an Array of Superconducting Qubits

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the experimental creation and control of a superconducting quantum metamaterial with eight qubits, revealing collective phenomena like superradiance, subradiance, and a tunable polaritonic bandgap, advancing waveguide QED applications.

Contribution

It introduces a large-scale superconducting qubit array in a waveguide, showing collective effects and bandgap control, extending previous small-qubit experiments to a full quantum metamaterial.

Findings

Observation of super- and subradiant states

Emergence of a polaritonic bandgap

Control of the bandgap via qubit nonlinearity

Abstract

Waveguide quantum electrodynamics offers a wide range of possibilities to effectively engineer interactions between artificial atoms via a one-dimensional open waveguide. While these interactions have been experimentally studied in the few qubit limit, the collective properties of such systems for larger arrays of qubits in a metamaterial configuration has so far not been addressed. Here, we experimentally study a metamaterial made of eight superconducting transmon qubits with local frequency control coupled to the mode continuum of a waveguide. By consecutively tuning the qubits to a common resonance frequency we observe the formation of super- and subradiant states, as well as the emergence of a polaritonic bandgap. Making use of the qubits quantum nonlinearity, we demonstrate control over the latter by inducing a transparency window in the bandgap region of the ensemble. The circuit of this work extends experiments with one and two qubits towards a full-blown quantum metamaterial, thus paving the way for large-scale applications in superconducting waveguide quantum electrodynamics.