Splitting a single Cooper-pair with microwave light

Abstract

We measure an aluminum superconducting double quantum dot and find that its electrical impedance, specifically its quantum capacitance, depends on whether or not it contains a single broken Cooper pair. In this way we are able to observe, in real time, the thermally activated breaking and recombination of Cooper pairs. Furthermore, we apply external microwave light and break single Cooper pairs by the absorption of single microwave photons.

13 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (10)

• Quantum supercurrent transistors in carbon nanotubes
• Majorana qubit decoherence by quasiparticle poisoning
• Millisecond charge-parity fluctuations and induced decoherence in a superconducting qubit
• Number fluctuations of sparse quasiparticles in a superconductor
• Decoherence of superconducting qubits caused by quasiparticle tunneling
• Microsecond resolution of quasiparticle tunneling in the single-Cooper-pair-transistor
• Kinetics of the superconducting charge qubit in the presence of a quasiparticle
• Time-domain measurements of quasiparticle tunneling rates in a single-Cooper-pair transistor
• Microwave-induced excess quasiparticles in superconducting resonators measured through correlated conductivity fluctuations
• A charge parity ammeter

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Gate-sensing coherent charge oscillations in a silicon field-effect transistor
• Transport signatures of an Andreev molecule in a quantum dot -- superconductor -- quantum dot setup
• Active quasiparticle suppression in a non-equilibrium superconductor
• Identifying single electron charge sensor events using wavelet edge detection
• Strong nonlocal tuning of the current-phase relation of a quantum dot based Andreev molecule
• The parity effect in Josephson junction arrays
• Random telegraph signal analysis with a recurrent neural network
• Cooper pair tunnelling and quasiparticle poisoning in a galvanically isolated superconducting double dot
• A superconductor free of quasiparticles for seconds