%0 Journal Article
%T Engineering Dissipative Channels for Realizing Schr£¿dinger Cats in SQUIDs
%A Mark J. Everitt
%A Timothy P. Spiller
%A Alexandre M. Zagoskin
%J Frontiers in ICT
%D 2014
%R 10.3389/fict.2014.00001
%X We show that by engineering the interaction with the environment, there exists a large class of systems that can evolve irreversibly to a cat state. To be precise, we show that it is possible to engineer an irreversible process so that the steady state is close to a pure Schr£¿dinger¡¯s cat state by using double well systems and an environment comprising two-photon (or phonon) absorbers. We also show that it should be possible to prolong the lifetime of a Schr£¿dinger¡¯s cat state exposed to the destructive effects of a conventional single-photon decohering environment. In addition to our general analysis, we present a concrete circuit realization of both system and environment that should be fabricatable with current technologies. Our protocol should make it easier to prepare and maintain Schr£¿dinger cat states, which would be useful in applications of quantum metrology and information processing as well as being of interest to those probing the quantum to classical transition.
%K cat state
%K quantum metrology
%K single-photon decoherence
%K decoherence
%K two-photon absorbers
%K quantum to classical transition
%K double well systems
%U http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fict.2014.00001/abstract