A natural atom placed into a cavity with time-dependent parameters can be parametrically excited due to interaction with the quantized photon mode. One of the channels for this process is the dynamical Lamb effect, induced by a nonadiabatic modulation of the atomic-level Lamb shift. However, in experiments with natural atoms it is quite difficult to isolate this effect from other mechanisms of atom excitation. We point out that a transmission line cavity coupled with a superconducting qubit (an artificial macroscopic atom) provides a unique platform for observation of the dynamical Lamb effect. A key idea is to exploit a dynamically tunable qubit-resonator coupling, which was implemented quite recently. By varying the coupling nonadiabatically, it is possible to parametrically excite a qubit through a nonadiabatic modulation of the Lamb shift, even if the cavity was initially empty. The dynamics of such a coupled system is studied within the Rabi model with a time-dependent coupling constant and beyond the rotating-wave approximation. An efficient method to increase the effect through the periodic and nonadiabatic switching of the qubit-resonator coupling energy is proposed.

We consider a disordered quantum metamaterial formed by an array of superconducting flux qubits coupled to microwave photons in a cavity. We map the system on the Tavis-Cummings model accounting for the disorder in frequencies of the qubits. The complex transmittance is calculated with the parameters taken from state-of-the-art experiments. We demonstrate that photon phase shift measurements allow to distinguish individual resonances in the metamaterial with up to 100 qubits, in spite of the decoherence spectral width being remarkably larger than the effective coupling constant. Our simulations are in agreement with the results of the recently reported experiment.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure

No abstract