Simone gives his Docent lecture at Chalmers

Detecting microwave radiation at the single-photon level is relevant for applications to quantum communication, sensing, and computing. While highly-efficient photodetectors exist in the optical domain, their microwave counterparts have remained elusive until very recently, mainly due to the small photon energy involved.

In this lecture I will review some approaches to microwave photodetection with superconducting circuits, including absorption by a microcalorimeter, capture by a single artificial atom, and qubit-photon entangling gates.  Finally, I will describe a continuous detector of thermal microwave radiation with applications in quantum computing and quantum thermodynamics.