All-microwave Lamb shift engineering for a fixed frequency multi-level superconducting qubit

It is known that the electromagnetic vacuum is responsible for the Lamb shift, which is a crucial phenomenon in quantum electrodynamics (QED). In circuit QED, the readout or bus resonators that are dispersively coupled can result in a significant Lamb shift of the qubit. However, previous approaches or proposals for controlling the Lamb shift in circuit QED demand overheads in circuit designs or non-perturbative renormalization of the system’s eigenbases, which can impose formidable limitations. In this work, we propose and demonstrate an all-microwave method for controlling the Lamb shift of fixed-frequency transmons. We employ the drive-induced longitudinal coupling between the transmon and resonator. By simply using an off-resonant monochromatic drive near the resonator frequency, we can control the net Lamb shift up to  ±30 MHz and engineer it to zero with the drive-induced longitudinal coupling without facing the aforementioned challenges. Our work establishes an efficient way of engineering the fundamental effects of the electromagnetic vacuum and provides greater flexibility in non-parametric frequency controls of multilevel systems. Engineering the Lamb shifts of superconducting qubits opens new opportunities in resonant frequency tunings and other applications. Here, the authors devise and demonstrate an all-microwave approach that can be utilized with fixed-frequency superconducting qubits.