Quantum metamaterials: Electromagnetic waves in a Josephson qubit line

Abstract

We consider the propagation of a classical electromagnetic wave through a transmission line, formed by identical superconducting charge qubits inside a superconducting resonator. Since the qubits can be in a coherent superposition of quantum states, we show that such a system demonstrates interesting new effects, such as a "breathing" photonic crystal with an oscillating bandgap, and a "quantum Archimedean screw" that transports, at an arbitrary controlled velocity, Josephson plasma waves through the transmission line. The key ingredient of these effects is that the optical properties of the Josephson transmission line are controlled by the quantum coherent state of the qubits.

Colloquium: Unusual resonators: Plasmonics, metamaterials, and random media

“…A more complete list of such systems would be much longer, since any wave system with localized modes can be treated as a generalized resonator. In particular, numerous quantum systems (not considered here) with potential wells, tunnelling, and relaxation could be effectively treated within the open-resonator framework (see, e.g., (Lazarides and Tsironis, 2007;Rakhmanov et al, 2007;Savel'ev et al, 2007;You and Nori, 2005)). Finally, it should be also noted that for some of the systems considered above there exist alternative ad hoc methods of description.…”

Dual-channel spontaneous emission of quantum dots in magnetic metamaterials

“…Overcoming this major obstacle would lead to novel functional materials based on the control of both electric and magnetic material responses at optical frequencies, namely, to negative refractive index [10][11][12] , chirality [13][14][15][16][17][18] and subwavelength imaging 19 as well as to compact nanolasers and spasers 20,21 . Finally, active metamaterials might also enter new, unexplored areas such as quantum metamaterials [22][23][24] . In recent years, strong efforts have been made to find practical ways of reducing losses in optical metamaterials 21,[25][26][27][28][29] , leading to the first demonstration of a loss-compensated negative-index metamaterial 26 .…”

From Josephson junction metamaterials to tunable pseudo-cavities

“…The reflection and transmission properties of these nonlinear scatterers have been probed in experiments with qubits [13,14,15] and SQUIDs [16]. More recently, arrangements of qubits or JJs have been suggested to tailor the propagation of light [17,18,19,20,12,21], conforming what is now called quantum metamaterials, the topic of this special issue. These are low loss devices, since the underlying medium for the photon is a superconductor at a very low temperature, but they introduce new physics: from engineering of bandgaps and dispersion relation as in classical wave propagation, to purely quantum effects such as electromagnetic induced transparency (EIT) [22,14] and other quantum phenomena.…”