Condensed matter physics has been driven forward by significant experimental and theoretical progress in the study and understanding of equilibrium phase transitions based on symmetry and topology. However, nonequilibrium phase transitions have remained a challenge, in part due to their complexity in theoretical descriptions and the additional experimental difficulties in systematically controlling systems out of equilibrium. Here, we study a one-dimensional chain of 72 microwave cavities, each coupled to a superconducting qubit, and coherently drive the system into a nonequilibrium steady state. We find experimental evidence for a dissipative phase transition in the system in which the steady state changes dramatically as the mean photon number is increased. Near the boundary between the two observed phases, the system demonstrates bistability, with characteristic switching times as long as 60 ms-far longer than any of the intrinsic rates known for the system. This experiment demonstrates the power of circuit QED systems for studying nonequilibrium condensed matter physics and paves the way for future experiments exploring nonequilbrium physics with many-body quantum optics.

After close to two decades of research and development, superconducting circuits have emerged as a rich platform for both quantum computation and quantum simulation. Lattices of superconducting coplanar waveguide (CPW) resonators have been shown to produce artificial materials for microwave photons, where weak interactions can be introduced either via non-linear resonator materials or strong interactions via qubit-resonator coupling. Here, we highlight the previouslyoverlooked property that these lattice sites are deformable and allow the realization of tight-binding lattices which are unattainable, even in conventional solid-state systems. In particular, we show that networks of CPW resonators can create a new class of materials which constitute regular lattices in an effective hyperbolic space with constant negative curvature. We present numerical simulations of a series of hyperbolic analogs of the kagome lattice which show unusual densities of states with a spectrally-isolated degenerate flat band. We also present a proof-of-principle experimental realization of one of these lattices. This paper represents the first step towards on-chip quantum simulation of materials science and interacting particles in curved space. arXiv:1802.09549v2 [quant-ph]

The superconducting transmon qubit is a leading platform for quantum computing and quantum science. Building large, useful quantum systems based on transmon qubits will require significant improvements in qubit relaxation and coherence times, which are orders of magnitude shorter than limits imposed by bulk properties of the constituent materials. This indicates that relaxation likely originates from uncontrolled surfaces, interfaces, and contaminants. Previous efforts to improve qubit lifetimes have focused primarily on designs that minimize contributions from surfaces. However, significant improvements in the lifetime of two-dimensional transmon qubits have remained elusive for several years. Here, we fabricate two-dimensional transmon qubits that have both lifetimes and coherence times with dynamical decoupling exceeding 0.3 milliseconds by replacing niobium with tantalum in the device. We have observed increased lifetimes for seventeen devices, indicating that these material improvements are robust, paving the way for higher gate fidelities in multi-qubit processors.

We identify and study classes of initial states in integrable quantum systems that, after the relaxation dynamics following a sudden quench, lead to near-thermal expectation values of fewbody observables. In the systems considered here, those states are found to be insulating ground states of lattice hard-core boson Hamiltonians. We show that, as a suitable parameter in the initial Hamiltonian is changed, those states become closer to Fock states (products of single site states) as the outcome of the relaxation dynamics becomes closer to the thermal prediction. At the same time, the energy density approaches a Gaussian. Furthermore, the entropy associated with the generalized canonical and generalized grand-canonical ensembles, introduced to describe observables in integrable systems after relaxation, approaches that of the conventional canonical and grand-canonical ensembles. We argue that those classes of initial states are special because a control parameter allows one to tune the distribution of conserved quantities to approach the one in thermal equilibrium. This helps in understanding the approach of all the quantities studied to their thermal expectation values. However, a finite-size scaling analysis shows that this behavior should not be confused with thermalization as understood for nonintegrable systems.