No abstract

We report on experimental evidence of directed electron transport, induced by external linear-polarized microwave irradiation, in a two-dimensional spatially-periodic asymmetrical system called "ratchet". The broken spatial symmetry was introduced in a high mobility two-dimensional electron gas based on AlGaAs/GaAs heterojunction, by patterning an array of artificial semi-discs-shaped antidots. We show that the direction of the transport is efficiently changed by microwave polarization. The dependence of the effect on magnetic field and temperature is investigated. This represents a significant step towards the realization of new microwave detectors and current generators.

The interaction between light and matter remains a central topic in modern physics despite decades of intensive research. Coupling an isolated emitter to a single mode of the electromagnetic field is now routinely achieved in the laboratory 1 , and standard quantum optics provides a complete toolbox for describing such a setup. Current efforts aim to go further and explore the coherent dynamics of systems containing an emitter coupled to several electromagnetic degrees of freedom 2-6 . Recently, ultrastrong coupling to a transmission line has been achieved where the emitter resonance broadens to a significant fraction of its frequency, and hybridizes with a continuum of electromagnetic (EM) modes 7,8 . In this work we gain significantly improved control over this regime. We do so by combining the simplicity and robustness of a transmon qubit and a bespoke EM environment 6,9,10 with a high density of discrete modes, hosted inside a superconducting metamaterial 11 . This produces a unique device in which the hybridisation between the qubit and many modes (up to ten in the current device) of its environment can be monitored directly. Moreover the frequency and broadening of the qubit resonance can be tuned independently of each other in situ. We experimentally demonstrate that our device combines this tunability with ultrastrong coupling 12-15 and a qubit nonlinearity comparable to the other relevant energy scales in the system. We also develop a quantitative theoretical description that does not contain any phenomenological parameters and that accurately takes into account vacuum fluctuations of our large scale quantum circuit in the regime of ultrastrong coupling and intermediate non-linearity. The demonstration of this new platform combined with a quantitative modelling brings closer the prospect of experimentally studying many-body effects in quantum optics. A limitation of the current device is the intermediate nonlinearity of the qubit. Pushing it further will induce fully developed many-body effects, such as a giant Lamb shift 16 or nonclassical states of multimode optical fields 17-20 . Observing such effects would establish interesting links between quantum optics and the physics of quantum impurities 21,22 . IntroductionDue to strong interactions between elementary constituants, correlated solids 23 and trapped cold atoms 24 host fascinating many-body phenomena. Attempts to produce similar effects in purely optical systems are hampered by the obvious fact that photons do not naturally interact with each other. If this obstacle can be overcome, there is the tantalizing prospect of probing the many-body problem using the contents of the quantum optics toolbox, such as single photon sources and detectors, high-order correlations in time-resolved measurements, entanglement measures, and phase space tomographies to name a few.One route to building a many-body quantum optical system is to rely on arrays of strongly non-linear cavities or resonators 22,25,26 , but minimising disorder in such architectures is a fo...