Microwave quantum photonics with superconducting circuits: from engineered light-matter interactions to quantum many-body physics

Abstract: In the last fifteen years, the rise of superconducting circuits in the context of quantum information processing has given birth to the field of microwave quantum photonics. This newborn field facilitates the study of light-matter interactions in extreme regimes and with an unprecedented degree of control and tunability. At the same time, it holds promise for quantum communication, enabling deterministic quantum state transfer and remote entanglement between nodes of a quantum network,  and quantum simulation, thanks, for instance, to the possibility of synthesizing tunable long-range interactions mediated by superconducting waveguides with engineered dispersion. I will briefly review the state of the art of the field and discuss some of our recent contributions to it, including the on-chip generation and routing of single and correlated microwave photons, the realization of a microwave-activated coupling based on a cavity-assisted Raman transition, and the quantum nondemolition detection of itinerant microwave photons based on a conditional phase gate. I will finally present a research agenda for the simulation of quantum many-body systems based on arrays of high-impedance superconducting resonators.