A new article led by QUANTIC member P. Forn-Díaz has been recently published on Physical Review Applied. The article presents a new method of generating single microwave photons on demand. The new technique consists in controlling the position of nodes of vacuum modes of a transmission line where a superconducting qubit is coupled. This control on the mode profile happens very quickly, in the nanosecond scale, and it results in a real-time tunable qubit-line interaction. This interaction produces photon wavepackets with a shape that can be nearly arbitrary.
The work was carried out at the laboratory of Prof. Christopher Wilson at the Institute for Quantum Computing in the University of Waterloo (Canada). This result is very relevant for the deployment of microwave quantum networks and to connect sectors of future large-scale quantum computers. The reference of the paper is Physical Review Applied 8, 054015 (2017).