Mr. Andrés Rosario Hamann

Our experiment comprises the first experimental implemenation of a so called "optical rectifier" or a non-reciprocal device based on quantum nonlinearity of two-level atoms. Our device is also the simplest possible device which can behave non-reciprocally and shows the connection between non-reciprocty and entangelement.

Recent theoretical studies of a pair of atoms in a 1D waveguide find that the system responds asymmetrically to incident fields from opposing directions at low powers. Since there is no explicit time-reversal symmetry breaking elements in the device, this has caused some debate. Here we show that the asymmetry arises from the formation of a quasi-dark-state of the two atoms, which saturates at extremely low power. In this case the nonlinear saturability explicitly breaks the assumptions of the Lorentz reciprocity theorem. Moreover, we show that the statistics of the output field from the driven system can be explained by a very simple stochastic mirror model and that at steady state, the two atoms and the local field are driven to an entangled, tripartite |W⟩ state. Because of this, we argue that the device is better understood as a saturable Yagi-Uda antenna, a distributed system of differentially-tuned dipoles that couples asymmetrically to external fields. 

The ability to determine whether a multi-level quantum system is in a certain state while preserving quantum coherence between all orthorgonal states is necessary to realize binary-outcome compatible measurements which are, in turn, a prerequisite for testing the contextuality of quantum mechanics. In this paper, we use a three-level superconducting system (a qutrit) coupled to a microwave cavity to explore different regimes of quantum measurement. In particular, we engineer the dispersive shifts of the cavity frequency to be identical for the first and second excited states of the qutrit which allows us to realize a strong projective binary-outcome measurement onto its ground state with a fidelity of 94.3%. Complemented with standard microwave control and low-noise parametric amplification, this scheme can be used to create sets of compatible measurements to reveal the contextual nature of superconducting circuits.