Publications

We present an experimental realization of resonance fluorescence in squeezed vacuum. We strongly couple microwave-frequency squeezed light to a superconducting artificial atom and detect the resulting fluorescence with high resolution enabled by a broadband traveling-wave parametric amplifier. We investigate the fluorescence spectra in the weak and strong driving regimes, observing up to 3.1 dB of reduction of the fluorescence linewidth below the ordinary vacuum level and a dramatic dependence of the Mollow triplet spectrum on the relative phase of the driving and squeezed vacuum fields. Our results are in excellent agreement with predictions for spectra produced by a two-level atom in squeezed vacuum [Phys. Rev. Lett. 58, 2539 (1987)], demonstrating that resonance fluorescence offers a resource-efficient means to characterize squeezing in cryogenic environments.

Detecting single photon level signals--carriers of both classical and quantum information--is particularly challenging for low-energy microwave frequency excitations. Here we introduce a superconducting amplifier based on a Josephson junction transmission line. Unlike current standing-wave parametric amplifiers, this traveling wave architecture robustly achieves high gain over a bandwidth of several gigahertz with sufficient dynamic range to read out 20 superconducting qubits. To achieve this performance, we introduce a sub-wavelength resonant phase matching technique that enables the creation of nonlinear microwave devices with unique dispersion relations. We benchmark the amplifier with weak measurements, obtaining a high quantum efficiency of 75% (70% including following amplifier noise). With a flexible design based on compact lumped elements, this Josephson amplifier has broad applicability to microwave metrology and quantum optics.