Physical Review X (Jun 2016)

Imaging Photon Lattice States by Scanning Defect Microscopy

  • D. L. Underwood,
  • W. E. Shanks,
  • Andy C. Y. Li,
  • Lamia Ateshian,
  • Jens Koch,
  • A. A. Houck

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.6.021044
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 6, no. 2
p. 021044

Abstract

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Microwave photons inside lattices of coupled resonators and superconducting qubits can exhibit surprising matterlike behavior. Realizing such open-system quantum simulators presents an experimental challenge and requires new tools and measurement techniques. Here, we introduce scanning defect microscopy as one such tool and illustrate its use in mapping the normal-mode structure of microwave photons inside a 49-site kagome lattice of coplanar waveguide resonators. Scanning is accomplished by moving a probe equipped with a sapphire tip across the lattice. This locally perturbs resonator frequencies and induces shifts of the lattice resonance frequencies, which we determine by measuring the transmission spectrum. From the magnitude of mode shifts, we can reconstruct photon field amplitudes at each lattice site and thus create spatial images of the photon-lattice normal modes.