Observation of Collective Coupling between an Engineered Ensemble of Macroscopic Artificial Atoms and a Superconducting Resonator
Kosuke Kakuyanagi, Yuichiro Matsuzaki, Corentin Déprez, Hiraku Toida, Kouichi Semba, Hiroshi Yamaguchi, William J. Munro, Shiro Saito · Physical Review Letters · 2016
The hybridization of distinct quantum systems is now seen as an effective way to engineer the properties of an entire system leading to applications in quantum metamaterials, quantum simulation, and quantum metrology. Recent improvements in both fabrication techniques and qubit design have allowed the community to consider coupling large ensembles of artificial atoms, such as superconducting qubits, to a resonator. Here, we demonstrate the coherent coupling between a microwave resonator and a macroscopic ensemble composed of several thousand superconducting flux qubits, where we observe a large dispersive frequency shift in the spectrum of 250 MHz. We achieve the large dispersive shift with a collective enhancement of the coupling strength between the resonator and qubits. These results represent the largest number of coupled superconducting qubits realized so far.