Floquet-Mode Traveling-Wave Parametric Amplifiers

TL;DR

This paper introduces Floquet mode amplifiers that enable broadband, quantum-limited, and directional amplification, overcoming limitations of conventional amplifiers and enhancing quantum measurement capabilities.

Contribution

The authors propose a novel Floquet mode-based amplifier design that suppresses backward wave generation and improves directionality, bandwidth, and quantum efficiency in quantum signal amplification.

Findings

Achieves >20 dB gain with >99.9% quantum efficiency

Suppresses nonlinear backward wave coupling for directionality

Operates over more than an octave of bandwidth

Abstract

Simultaneous ideal quantum measurements of multiple single-photon-level signals would advance applications in quantum information processing, metrology, and astronomy, but require the first amplifier to be simultaneously broadband, quantum limited, and directional. However, conventional traveling-wave parametric amplifiers support broadband amplification at the cost of increased added noise and are not genuinely directional due to non-negligible nonlinear backward wave generation. In this work, we introduce a new class of amplifiers which encode the information in the Floquet modes of the system. Such Floquet mode amplifiers prevent information leakage and overcome the trade-off between quantum efficiency (QE) and bandwidth. Crucially, Floquet mode amplifiers strongly suppress the nonlinear forward-backward wave coupling and are therefore genuinely directional and readily integrable with qubits, clearing another major obstacle towards broadband ideal quantum measurements. Furthermore, Floquet mode amplifiers are insensitive to out-of-band impedance mismatch, which otherwise may lead to gain ripples, parametric oscillations, and instability in conventional traveling-wave parametric amplifiers. Finally, we show that a Floquet mode Josephson traveling-wave parametric amplifier implementation can simultaneously achieve $>\!20\,$dB gain and a QE of $\eta/\eta_{\mathrm{ideal}}\!> 99.9\%$ of the quantum limit over more than an octave of bandwidth. The proposed Floquet scheme is also widely applicable to other platforms, such as kinetic inductance traveling-wave amplifiers and optical parametric amplifiers.