The topological phases of matter are characterized using the Berry phase, a geometrical phase, associated with the energy-momentum band structure. The quantization of the Berry phase, and the associated wavefunction polarization, manifest themselves as remarkably robust physical observables, such as quantized Hall conductivity and disorder-insensitive photonic transport. Recently, a novel class of topological phases, called higher-order topological phases, were proposed by generalizing the fundamental relationship between the Berry phase and the quantized polarization, from dipole to multipole moments [1][2][3][4]. Here, we demonstrate the first photonic realization of the quantized quadrupole topological phase, using silicon photonics. In this 2nd-order topological phase, the quantization of the bulk quadrupole moment in a two-dimensional system manifests as topologically robust corner states. We unambiguously show the presence of localized corner states and establish their robustness against certain defects. Furthermore, we contrast these topological states against topologically-trivial corner states, in a system without bulk quadrupole moment, and observe no robustness. Our photonic platform could enable the development of robust on-chip classical and quantum optical devices with higher-order topological protection. arXiv:1812.09304v2 [physics.optics]

In this work we introduce two code families, which we call the heavy hexagon code and heavy square code. Both code families are implemented by assigning physical data and ancilla qubits to both vertices and edges of low degree graphs. Such a layout is particularly suitable for superconducting qubit architectures to minimize frequency collision and crosstalk. In some cases, frequency collisions can be reduced by several orders of magnitude. The heavy hexagon code is a hybrid surface/Bacon-Shor code mapped onto a (heavy) hexagonal lattice whereas the heavy square code is the surface code mapped onto a (heavy) square lattice. In both cases, the lattice includes all the ancilla qubits required for fault-tolerant error-correction. Naively, the limited qubit connectivity might be thought to limit the error-correcting capability of the code to less than its full distance. Therefore, essential to our construction is the use of flag qubits. We modify minimum weight perfect matching decoding to effciently and scalably incorporate information from measurements of the flag qubits and correct up to the full code distance while respecting the limited connectivity. Simulations show that high threshold values for both codes can be obtained using our decoding protocol. Further, our decoding scheme can be adapted to other topological code families.

There has been recent progress in understanding chaotic features in many-body quantum systems. Motivated by the scrambling of information in black holes, it has been suggested that the time dependence of out-of-timeordered (OTO) correlation functions such as O 2 (t)O 1 (0)O 2 (t)O 1 (0) is a faithful measure of quantum chaos. Experimentally, these correlators are challenging to access since they apparently require access to both forward and backward time evolution with the system Hamiltonian. Here, we propose a protocol to measure such OTO correlators using an ancilla which controls the direction of time. Specifically, by coupling the state of ancilla to the system Hamiltonian of interest, we can emulate the forward and backward time propagation, where the ancilla plays the role of a 'quantum clock'. Within this scheme, the continuous evolution of the entire system (the system of interest and the ancilla) is governed by a time-independent Hamiltonian. Our protocol is immune to errors that could occur when the direction of time evolution is externally controlled by a classical switch.

In circuit QED, protocols for quantum gates and readout of superconducting qubits often rely on the dispersive regime, reached when the qubit-photon detuning ∆ is large compared to the mutual coupling strength. For qubits including the Cooper-pair box and transmon, selection rules dramatically restrict the contributions to dispersive level shifts χ. By contrast, in the absence of selection rules many virtual transitions contribute to χ and can produce sizable dispersive shifts even at large detuning. We present theory for a generic multi-level qudit capacitively coupled to one or multiple harmonic modes, and give general expressions for the effective Hamiltonian in second and fourth order perturbation theory. Applying our results to the fluxonium system, we show that the absence of strong selection rules explains the surprisingly large dispersive shifts observed in experiments and leads to the prediction of a two-photon vacuum Rabi splitting. Quantitative predictions from our theory are in good agreement with experimental data over a wide range of magnetic flux and reveal that fourth-order resonances are important for the phase modulation observed in fluxonium spectroscopy.

Entanglement, and, in particular, the entanglement spectrum, plays a major role in characterizing manybody quantum systems. While there has been a surge of theoretical works on the subject, no experimental measurement has been performed to date because of the lack of an implementable measurement scheme. Here, we propose a measurement protocol to access the entanglement spectrum of many-body states in experiments with cold atoms in optical lattices. Our scheme effectively performs a Ramsey spectroscopy of the entanglement Hamiltonian and is based on the ability to produce several copies of the state under investigation, together with the possibility to perform a global swap gate between two copies conditioned on the state of an auxiliary qubit. We show how the required conditional swap gate can be implemented with cold atoms, either by using Rydberg interactions or coupling the atoms to a cavity mode. We illustrate these ideas on a simple (extended) Bose-Hubbard model where such a measurement protocol reveals topological features of the Haldane phase.

The color code is a topological quantum error-correcting code supporting a variety of valuable faulttolerant logical gates. Its two-dimensional version, the triangular color code, may soon be realized with currently available superconducting hardware despite constrained qubit connectivity. To guide this experimental effort, we study the storage threshold of the triangular color code against circuitlevel depolarizing noise. First, we adapt the Restriction Decoder to the setting of the triangular color code and to phenomenological noise. Then, we propose a fault-tolerant implementation of the stabilizer measurement circuits, which incorporates flag qubits. We show how information from flag qubits can be used in an efficient and scalable way with the Restriction Decoder to maintain the effective distance of the code. We numerically estimate the threshold of the triangular color code to be 0.2%, which is competitive with the thresholds of other topological quantum codes. We also prove that 1-flag stabilizer measurement circuits are sufficient to preserve the full code distance, which may be used to find simpler syndrome extraction circuits of the color code. OPEN ACCESS RECEIVED

Qubits strongly coupled to a photonic crystal give rise to many exotic physical scenarios, beginning with single and multi-excitation qubit-photon dressed bound states comprising induced spatially localized photonic modes, centered around the qubits, and the qubits themselves. The localization of these states changes with qubit detuning from the band-edge, offering an avenue of in situ control of bound state interaction. Here, we present experimental results from a device with two qubits coupled to a superconducting microwave photonic crystal and realize tunable on-site and inter-bound state interactions. We observe a fourth-order two photon virtual process between bound states indicating strong coupling between the photonic crystal and qubits. Due to their localization-dependent interaction, these states offer the ability to create one-dimensional chains of bound states with tunable and potentially long-range interactions that preserve the qubits' spatial organization, a key criterion for realization of certain quantum many-body models. The widely tunable, strong and robust interactions demonstrated with this system are promising benchmarks towards realizing larger, more complex systems of bound states.

The classification of symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases in one dimension has been recently achieved, and had a fundamental impact in our understanding of quantum phases in condensed matter physics. In this framework, SPT phases can be identified by many-body topological invariants, which are quantized non-local correlators for the many-body wavefunction. While SPT phases can now be realized in interacting synthethic quantum systems, the direct measurement of quantized many-body topological invariants has remained so far elusive. Here, we propose measurement protocols for many-body topological invariants for all types of protecting symmetries of one-dimensional interacting bosonic systems. Our approach relies on randomized measurements implemented with local random unitaries, and can be applied to any spin system with single-site addressability and readout. Our scheme thus provides a versatile toolbox to experimentally classify interacting SPT phases.