Tunable Quantum Beam Splitters for Coherent Manipulation of a Solid-State Tripartite Qubit System (1004.4657v3)

Abstract: Coherent control of quantum states is at the heart of implementing solid-state quantum processors and testing quantum mechanics at the macroscopic level. Despite significant progress made in recent years in controlling single- and bi-partite quantum systems, coherent control of quantum wave function in multipartite systems involving artificial solid-state qubits has been hampered due to the relatively short decoherence time and lacking of precise control methods. Here we report the creation and coherent manipulation of quantum states in a tripartite quantum system, which is formed by a superconducting qubit coupled to two microscopic two-level systems (TLSs). The avoided crossings in the system's energy-level spectrum due to the qubit-TLS interaction act as tunable quantum beam splitters of wave functions. Our result shows that the Landau-Zener-St\"{u}ckelberg interference has great potential in the precise control of the quantum states in the tripartite system.