Quantum sensing composite excitations in an anisotropic ferromagnet via a qubit

Abstract

Ordered magnets harbor intrinsically squeezed ground states and magnonic excitations characterized by entanglement between spins and nonclassical magnon number composition. A pathway to detecting the superpositions of noneigenmode magnon number states underlying these nonclassical magnetic ground states has recently been demonstrated by utilizing a qubit coupled to the magnon mode via a direct dispersive interaction. Here, we theoretically develop this qubit spectroscopy further delineating the capabilities and limitations of this qubit spectroscopy for sensing the quantum superpositions that underlie the excited states. We demonstrate that the spectroscopy lends itself naturally to unraveling the superpositions that underlie the various quantized squeezed-magnon number states. However, excited states comprising superpositions of multiple squeezed Fock states become increasingly hard due to the large number of possible transitions, and resulting peaks, in the qubit spectroscopy thereby requiring qubits with narrower linewidths. Along the same lines, we theoretically demonstrate the qubit spectroscopy of a low amplitude coherent squeezed-magnon state analyzing the tradeoff between frequency crowding due to multiple transitions and peak linewidths. Our work lays the groundwork and design equations for deploying high-quality qubits towards sensing the composite nature of spin excitations in magnetic systems.