On-chip superconducting microwave frequency divider

Abstract

We propose an on-chip superconducting microwave frequency divider based on the simultaneous excitation of two superconducting qubits by a single photon. The proposed circuit consists of two flux qubits and three superconducting resonators. A high-frequency photon stored in the input resonator simultaneously excites two qubits through an effective three-body interaction, and the excitation energy is subsequently transferred into two low-frequency resonators. As a result, one high-frequency microwave signal can be divided into two spatially separated low-frequency output signals. The continuous-wave output, conversion efficiency, and controllable pulse outputs of the proposed device are analyzed numerically using the master-equation approach. Compared with conventional nonlinear frequency-conversion schemes, the proposed device naturally generates spatially separated output channels, which may simplify microwave signal routing in superconducting quantum processors.