Superconducting flux qubits are a promising candidate for realizing quantum information processing and quantum simulations. Such devices behave like artificial atoms, with the advantage that one can easily tune the “atoms” internal properties. Here, by harnessing this flexibility, we propose a technique to minimize the inhomogeneous broadening of a large ensemble of flux qubits by tuning only the external flux. In addition, as an example of many-body physics in such an ensemble, we show how to observe superradiance, and its quadratic scaling with ensemble size, using a tailored microwave control pulse that takes advantage of the inhomogeneous broadening itself to excite only a subensemble of the qubits. Our scheme opens up an approach to using superconducting circuits to explore the properties of quantum many-body systems.

• Received 25 July 2016

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.94.224510