Driven multiphoton qubit-resonator interactions

Abstract

We develop a general theory for multiphoton qubit-resonator interactions enhanced by a qubit drive. The interactions generate qubit-conditional operations in the resonator when the driving is near $n$-photon cross-resonance, namely, the qubit drive is $n$-times the resonator frequency. We pay special attention to the strong driving regime, where the interactions are conditioned on the qubit dressed states. We consider the specific case where $n=2$, which results in qubit-conditional squeezing (QCS). We show that the QCS protocol can be used to generate a superposition of orthogonally squeezed states following a properly chosen qubit measurement. We outline quantum information processing applications for these states, including encoding a qubit in a resonator via the superposition of orthogonally squeezed states. We show how the QCS operation can be used to realize a controlled-squeeze gate and its use in bosonic phase estimation. The QCS protocol can also be utilized to achieve faster unitary operator synthesis on the joint qubit-resonator Hilbert space. Next, we investigate the use of a two-tone drive to engineer an effective $n$-photon Rabi Hamiltonian with widely tunable effective system parameters, which could enable the realization of new regimes that have so far been inaccessible. Finally, we propose a multiphoton circuit QED implementation based on a transmon qubit coupled to a resonator via an asymmetric SQUID. We provide realistic parameter estimates for the two-photon operation regime that can host the aforementioned two-photon protocols. We use numerical simulations to show that even in the presence of spurious terms and decoherence, our analytical predictions are robust.