Microwave Photon Dynamics in a Superconducting Multimode Metamaterial Resonator

Superconducting devices in circuit Quantum Electrodynamics (cQED) systems represent a leading candidate for scalable quantum computing architectures. Within this framework, superconducting metamaterial resonators, composed of arrays of lumped circuit elements, can be arranged to exhibit left-handed dispersion and dense mode spectra above an infrared cutoff frequency set by the circuit parameters. When these resonators are coupled to qubits, they enable the exploration of large-scale entanglement between photons and the simulation of complex many-body phenomena in quantum systems. Qubits exhibiting super-strong coupling to the dense metamaterial modes can interact strongly with multiple modes simultaneously. Consequently, excitations within this system can traverse among these modes and the qubit, leading to the possibility of implementing quantum random walks in the frequency domain. Because this walk across many nodes would only require a single qubit and one multimode resonator, this is potentially an efficient route toward quantum simulation. Here, we report on initial measurements probing the dynamics of the super-strong coupling regime of a transmon and planar superconducting metamaterial in a cQED platform.