Speaker: Professor Britton Plourde, Syracuse University
Abstract: There has been tremendous progress in recent years with the development of superconducting qubits and cavities. I will describe two recent efforts in this area at Syracuse University. We have implemented a frequency-modulated driving technique with asymmetric transmon qubits for generating first-order sideband transitions for the rapid exchange of excitations between qubits and cavities. There are a variety of loss mechanisms that can influence the performance of both superconducting cavities and qubits, including magnetic flux vortices and quasiparticles. We are working on experiments with structures for trapping a single vortex in a superconducting microwave cavity. For certain locations of the vortex in the cavity, we observe a decrease in the microwave loss, which we attribute to a reduction of the quasiparticle density due to interactions with the vortex core.