Beecroft Building
Abstract
In the past decade, quantum simulators have increased in their power and scope, offering exquisite dynamical control of tens or even hundreds of individual qubits. Central to this development is the external driving toolbox. Be it resonant or off-resonant, continuous or pulsed, driving protocols have come a long way since the early days of NMR to provide detailed control of both effective Hamiltonian and state. In this talk, I will argue for the addition of a new class of driving protocol to the quantum mechanics’ toolbox: quasiperiodic driving.
As an example, I will show that quasi-periodically driven systems realize robust energy pumps, with topological invariants characterizing the dynamical response. Remarkably, the pumped energy quasi-periodically re-coheres. I will describe current experimental efforts in superconducting circuits to exploit this re-coherence to prepare highly excited non-classical cavity states, an effect we call cavity state boosting. More generally, multi-tone driving can be understood in terms of "synthetic dimensions", which enables a broad range of topological condensed matter phenomena to be translated into robust dynamical responses of lower dimensional systems.