Vacuum Rabi splitting due to strong coupling of a flux qubit and a coplanar-waveguide resonator

We have experimentally studied a superconducting flux qubit strongly coupled to a single mode of a high-quality transmission-type coplanar-waveguide resonator. The qubit-resonator coupling is revealed in the resonator transmission spectrum as a vacuum Rabi splitting. In the dispersive regime the qubit energy levels are spectroscopically probed. We observe a shift in the qubit transition frequency that linearly depends on the number of photons in the resonator, which is attributed to the ac-Zeeman shift. The observations are in agreement with the theoretical predictions.