Quantum phase tomography of a strongly driven qubit

Phys Rev Lett. 2008 Nov 7;101(19):190502. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.101.190502. Epub 2008 Nov 7.

Abstract

The interference between repeated Landau-Zener transitions in a qubit swept through an avoided level crossing results in Stückelberg oscillations in qubit magnetization, a hallmark of the coherent strongly driven regime in two-level systems. The two-dimensional Fourier transforms of the resulting oscillatory patterns are found to exhibit a family of one-dimensional curves in Fourier space, in agreement with recent observations in a superconducting qubit. We interpret these images in terms of time evolution of the quantum phase of the qubit state and show that they can be used to probe dephasing mechanisms.