Cross-Kerr-effect induced by coupled Josephson qubits in circuit quantum electrodynamics

Abstract

We propose a scheme for implementing cross-Kerr nonlinearity between two superconducting transmission line resonators (TLRs) via their interactions with a coupler constructed by two superconducting transmon qubits connected to each other through a superconducting quantum interference device. When suitably driven, the coupler can induce very strong cross phase modulation (XPM) between the two TLRs due to its $N$-type level structure and the consequent electromagnetically induced transparency in its lowest states. The flexibility of our design can lead to various inter-TLR coupling configurations. The obtained cross-Kerr coefficient is large enough to allow many important quantum operations in which only few photons are involved. We further show that this scheme is very robust against fluctuations in solid-state quantum circuits. Our numerical calculations imply that the absorption and the dispersion of the TLRs resulting from the decoherence of the coupler are very small compared with the proposed XPM strength.