Fernando C. Lombardo
Departamento de Física, FCEyN, Universidad de Buenos Aires

Technology based on superconducting circuits, consisting of small units fabricated with Josephson junctions and other elements that behave as artificial atoms and are interconnected by microwave resonators that store quantum excitations of the electromagnetic field, currently appears to be the most promising for building quantum computers and simulators. Using “circuit quantum electrodynamics,” we have studied the generation of photons via parametric resonance (also known as the Dynamic Casimir Effect), the robustness of the geometric phase in situations where losses in the resonators induce dissipation and decoherence, and also the possibility of implementing cycles in quantum thermal machines and finding shortcuts to adiabaticity. In this talk, a new idea is presented: the design of a gate that, controlled by the quantum state of one of these artificial atoms, generates squeezed states of the electromagnetic field in one of the resonators. We will discuss how to construct this device, which constitutes a universal quantum gate. A method will be shown for encoding quantum information in the resonators, which can easily detect the footprint of the most common degrading process: photon loss.