Left-handed superlattice metamaterials for circuit QED

Abstract: Quantum simulations is a promising field where a controllable system is used to mimic another system of interest, whose properties one wants to investigate. One of the key issues for such simulations is the ability to control the environment the system couples to, be it to isolate the system or to engineer a tailored environment of interest. One strategy recently put forward for environment engineering is the use of metamaterials with negative index of refraction. Here we build on this concept and propose a circuit-QED simulation of many-body Hamiltonians using superlattice metamaterials. We give a detailed description of a superlattice transmission line coupled to an embedded qubit, and show how this system can be used to simulate the spin-boson model in regimes where analytical and numerical methods usually fail, e.g. the strong coupling regime.