Tunable quantum beam splitters for coherent manipulation of a solid-state tripartite qubit system

Coherent control of quantum states is at the heart of implementing solid-state quantum processors and testing quantum mechanics at the macroscopic level. Despite significant progress made in recent years in controlling single- and bi-partite quantum systems, coherent control of quantum wave function in multipartite systems involving artificial solid-state qubits has been hampered due to the relatively short decoherence time and lack of precise control methods. Here we report the creation and coherent manipulation of quantum states in a tripartite quantum system, which is formed by a superconducting qubit coupled to two microscopic two-level systems (TLSs). The avoided crossings in the system's energy-level spectrum due to the qubit–TLS interaction act as tunable quantum beam splitters of wave functions. Our result shows that the Landau–Zener–Stückelberg interference has great potential in precise control of the quantum states in the tripartite system.