Preparing a Superfluid in a Bose Hubbard lattice

Synthetic photonic systems provide a promising platform for exploring the physics of highly correlated quantum materials. Using the flexible toolset of microwave photons and superconducting circuits in the circuit QED paradigm, we build a 1D Bose-Hubbard lattice where capacitively coupled transmon qubits serve as lattice sites, and the transmon anharmonicity produces strong photon-photon collisions. Individual readout resonators allow site-, time-, and occupancy- resolved microscopy of the photonic lattice. In previous work, we employed an engineered reservoir to realize a dissipatively stabilized site and coupled it to the lattice to prepare a n=1 Mott insulating phase of light. Recent improvements to our apparatus enable us to locally probe multi-site correlations and thus precisely characterize delocalized lattice states. We discuss prospects for melting our prepared Mott insulator into a superfluid by adiabatically tuning the volume of our chain, and investigating correlations during both the cooling and the steady state.These efforts can shed light on the intricate interplay of entanglement and thermalization in these QMB systems.