What is bosonic quantum information processing?
Quantum bits (qubits) - the fundamental units of information in a quantum computer – are inherently fragile and their information is easily lost over time leading to errors in the computation. Extending the time over which this information can be faithfully retained is a crucial frontier of current research.
In our group, we develop new ways to store and manipulate quantum information in nonlinear superconducting oscillators. A key element of our work is to make use of the many energy levels present in these oscillators to encode qubits that are intrinsically protected against errors. To do this we devise and implement new parametric processes in nonlinear quantum oscillators in order to stabilize the highly excited basis states of these qubits. Our goal is to explore both the promise of this approach for quantum information processing, as well as its fundamental aspects in the context of out-of-equilibrium physics.