Generating and verifying entangled-itinerant microwave fields

This thesis presents the experimental achievements of (1) generating entangled-microwave fields propagating on two physically separate transmission lines and (2) verifying the entangled states with efficient measurements. Shared entanglement between two parties is an essential re-source for quantum information processing and quantum communication protocols. Experimen-tally, entangled pairs of electromagnetic fields can be realized by distributing a squeezed vacuum over two separated modes. As a result, entanglement is revealed by the strong cross-correlations between specific quadratures of the two modes. Although it is possible to verify the presence of entanglement with low-efficiency quadrature measurements, higher detection efficiencies are desired for performing protocols that exploit entanglement with high fidelity.

In the microwave regime, Josephson parametric amplifiers (JPAs) fulfill the two major tasks mentioned above: JPAs prepare the required squeezed states to generate entanglement and enable us to perform efficient quadrature measurements. Therefore, for the purposes of entanglement generation and verification, ultralow-noise–frequency-tunable JPAs have been developed. Addi-tionally, to increase the efficiency of entanglement generation, we integrate JPAs with two on-chip microwave passive components, a directional coupler and a quadrature hybrid, to form an entangler circuit. The two-mode entangled states are created at the two output modes of the entangler and are measured with a two-channel measurement apparatus where each of the two channels incor-porates a JPA as a single-quadrature preamplifier. By employing this measurement scheme, the two measured quadratures of the two output modes can be chosen independently of each other, enabling a full characterization of the two-mode state. To definitively demonstrate the two-mode entanglement, I prove that the measured quadrature variances satisfy the inseparability criterion.