Inelastic scattering of a photon by a quantum phase-slip

Abstract

Spontaneous decay of a single photon is a notoriously inefficient process in nature irrespective of the frequency range. We report that a quantum phase-slip fluctuation in high-impedance superconducting waveguides can split a single incident microwave photon into a large number of lower-energy photons with a near unit probability. The underlying inelastic photon-photon interaction has no analogs in non-linear optics. Instead, the measured decay rates are explained without adjustable parameters in the framework of a new model of a quantum impurity in a Luttinger liquid. Our result connects circuit quantum electrodynamics to critical phenomena in two-dimensional boundary quantum field theories, important in the physics of strongly-correlated systems. The photon lifetime data represents a rare example of verified and useful quantum many-body simulation.

minor revision for clarity, supplementary material is available at www.superconducting-circuits.com

References in corpus (8)

• Charge insensitive qubit design derived from the Cooper pair box
• Continuous-time Monte Carlo methods for quantum impurity models
• Resolving photon number states in a superconducting circuit
• Beyond Strong Coupling in a Massively Multimode Cavity
• Nonlinear interaction between two heralded single photons
• Inelastic Microwave Photon Scattering off a Quantum Impurity in a Josephson-Junction Array
• The Super-Strong Coupling Regime of Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics
• Microwave spectroscopy of a weakly-pinned charge density wave in a superinductor

Cited by in corpus (18)

• Absence versus Presence of Dissipative Quantum Phase Transition in Josephson Junctions
• Nonperturbative Waveguide Quantum Electrodynamics
• Down-conversion of a single photon as a probe of many-body localization
• Bolometric detection of Josephson inductance in a highly resistive environment
• Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill state preparation using periodic driving
• Tuning the inductance of Josephson junction arrays without SQUIDs
• Inelastic decay from integrability
• Emergent quantum phase transition of a Josephson junction coupled to a high-impedance multimode resonator
• Observation of the Schmid-Bulgadaev dissipative quantum phase transition
• Direct detection of down-converted photons spontaneously produced at a single Josephson junction
• Functional Renormalization Group Approach to Circuit Quantum Electrodynamics
• Bloch oscillations in a transmon embedded in a resonant electromagnetic environment
• Radiative Properties of an Artificial Atom coupled to a Josephson Junction Array
• Circuit QED theory of direct and dual Shapiro steps with finite-size transmission line resonators
• Synchronization of Bloch oscillations by gate voltage modulation
• Quantum simulation of the microscopic to macroscopic crossover using superconducting quantum impurities
• Static impurity in a mesoscopic system of SU($N$) fermionic matter-waves
• Photon-instanton scattering in a superconducting circuit: Beyond the very high impedance regime