Correlation measurement of propagating microwave photons at millikelvin

TL;DR

This paper introduces a nanobolometer-based measurement technique for directly observing quantum statistical properties of microwave photons at millikelvin temperatures, enabling detailed analysis of photon statistics and quantum states.

Contribution

The authors develop and demonstrate a nanobolometer method that overcomes thermal noise and amplification challenges to measure microwave photon statistics at millikelvin temperatures.

Findings

Resolved photon number states with nanobolometer.

Observed n(n+1)-scaling law of photon number variance.

Detected transition from super-Poissonian to Poissonian photon statistics.

Abstract

Microwave photons are important carriers of quantum information in many promising platforms for quantum computing. They can be routinely generated, controlled, and teleported in experiments, indicating a variety of applications in quantum technology. However, observation of quantum statistical properties of microwave photons remains demanding: The energy of several microwave photons is considerably smaller than the thermal fluctuation of any room-temperature detector, while amplification necessarily induces noise. Here, we present a measurement technique with a nanobolometer that directly measures the photon statistics at the millikelvin temperature and overcomes this trade-off. We apply our method to thermal states generated by a blackbody radiator operating in the regime of circuit quantum electrodynamics. We demonstrate the photon number resolvedness of the nanobolometer, and reveal the n(n+1)-scaling law of the photon number variance as indicated by the Bose--Einstein distribution. By engineering the coherent and incoherent proportions of the input field, we observe the transition between super-Poissonian and Poissonian statistics of the microwave photons from the bolometric second-order correlation measurement. This technique is poised to serve in fundamental tests of quantum mechanics with microwave photons and function as a scalable readout solution for a quantum information processor.