A new paper in Nature Communications by members of the Painter group presents their recent work to couple a transmon qubit to a superconducting metamaterial.  Mohammad Mihosseini, Eunjong Kim, Vinicius S. Ferreira, Mahmoud Kalaee, Alp Sipahigil, Andrew J. Keller, Oskar Painter (2018) Superconducting metamaterials for waveguide quantum electrodynamics. Nature Communications, 9 . Art. No. 3706.
More about the Painter group’s work and the September 12 paper are included in the Caltech Media article Superconducting Metamaterial Traps Quantum Light
metamaterial waveguides Painter group

Optical image of a silicon microchip with thin-film superconducting matematerial waveguides.

“Superconducting quantum circuits allow one to perform fundamental quantum electrodynamics experiments using a microwave electrical circuit that looks like it could have been yanked directly from your cell phone,” Painter says. “We believe that augmenting these circuits with superconducting metamaterials may enable future quantum computing technologies and further the study of more complex quantum systems that lie beyond our capability to model using even the most powerful classical computer simulations.”

Abstract: Embedding tunable quantum emitters in a photonic bandgap structure enables control of dissipative and dispersive interactions between emitters and their photonic bath. Operation in the transmission band, outside the gap, allows for studying waveguide quantum electrodynamics in the slow-light regime. Alternatively, tuning the emitter into the bandgap results in finite-range emitter–emitter interactions via bound photonic states. Here, we couple a transmon qubit to a superconducting metamaterial with a deep sub-wavelength lattice constant (λ/60). The metamaterial is formed by periodically loading a transmission line with compact, low-loss, low-disorder lumped-element microwave resonators. Tuning the qubit frequency in the vicinity of a band-edge with a group index of ng = 450, we observe an anomalous Lamb shift of − 28 MHz accompanied by a 24-fold enhancement in the qubit lifetime. In addition, we demonstrate selective enhancement and inhibition of spontaneous emission of different transmon transitions, which provide simultaneous access to short-lived radiatively damped and long-lived metastable qubit states.