A A Houck. Low-disorder microwave cavity lattices for quantum simulation with photons

Historically our understanding of the microscopic world has been impeded by limita-tions in systems that behave classically. Even today, understanding simple problems in quantum mechanics remains a difficult task both computationally and experi-mentally. As a means of overcoming these classical limitations, the idea of using a controllable quantum system to simulate a less controllable quantum system has been proposed. This concept is known as quantum simulation and is the origin of the ideas behind quantum computing. In this thesis, experiments have been conducted that address the feasibility of using devices with a circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) architecture as a quantum simulator. In a cQED device, a superconducting qubit is capacitively coupled to a superconducting resonator resulting in coherent quantum behavior of the qubit when it interacts with photons inside the resonator. It has been shown theoretically that by forming a lattice of cQED elements, different quantum phases of photons will exist for different system parameters. In order to realize such a quantum simulator