Effective versus Floquet theory for the Kerr parametric oscillator

Ignacio García-Mata1, Rodrigo G. Cortiñas2,3, Xu Xiao2, Jorge Chávez-Carlos4, Victor S. Batista5,3, Lea F. Santos4, and Diego A. Wisniacki6

1Instituto de Investigaciones Físicas de Mar del Plata (IFIMAR), Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata & CONICET, 7600 Mar del Plata, Argentina
2Department of Applied Physics and Physics, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520, USA
3Yale Quantum Institute, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520, USA
4Department of Physics, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, USA
5Department of Chemistry, Yale University, P.O. Box 208107, New Haven, Connecticut 06520-8107, USA
6Departamento de Física ``J. J. Giambiagi'' and IFIBA, FCEyN, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1428 Buenos Aires, Argentina

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Abstract

Parametric gates and processes engineered from the perspective of the static effective Hamiltonian of a driven system are central to quantum technology. However, the perturbative expansions used to derive static effective models may not be able to efficiently capture all the relevant physics of the original system. In this work, we investigate the conditions for the validity of the usual low-order static effective Hamiltonian used to describe a Kerr oscillator under a squeezing drive. This system is of fundamental and technological interest. In particular, it has been used to stabilize Schrödinger cat states, which have applications for quantum computing. We compare the states and energies of the effective static Hamiltonian with the exact Floquet states and quasi-energies of the driven system and determine the parameter regime where the two descriptions agree. Our work brings to light the physics that is left out by ordinary static effective treatments and that can be explored by state-of-the-art experiments.

Qubits created with driven nonlinear (Kerr) oscillators, such as the transmon qubits in existing quantum computers, are protected against some sources of decoherence. A common approach to understand the properties of this system is to consider a static effective approximation of its Hamiltonian. However, all approximations have limits. Our work exposes these limits and provides the parameters regions where the static effective description holds. This knowledge is very important for future experimental setups that plan to push nonlinearities to larger values to achieve faster gates.

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