Harnessing electro-optic correlations in an efficient mechanical converter

By Andrew Higginbotham, P. S. Burns, M. Urmey, R. W. Peterson, N. Kampel, B. Brubaker, Graeme Smith, Konrad W. Lehnert, C. Regal. Nature Physics, 2017

246 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An optical network of superconducting quantum bits (qubits) is an appealing platform for quantum communication and distributed quantum computing, but developing a quantum-compatible link between the microwave and optical domains remains an outstanding challenge. Operating at T < 100 mK temperatures, as required for quantum electrical circuits, we demonstrate a mechanically mediated microwave–optical converter with 47% conversion efficiency, and use a classical feed-forward protocol to reduce added noise to 38 photons. The feed-forward protocol harnesses our discovery that noise emitted from the two converter output ports is strongly correlated because both outputs record thermal motion of the same mechanical mode. We also discuss a quantum feed-forward protocol that, given high system efficiencies, would allow quantum information to be transferred even when thermal phonons enter the mechanical element faster than the electro-optic conversion rate.A mechanical-mediated quantum-compatible microwave–optical converter achieves high efficiency through a feed-forward protocol that harnesses correlations in the output noise.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/53971f6f59423e1dd12d66f62c66c48317d32a93

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Citations in the corpus

Advances in lithium niobate photonics: development status and perspectives (2022, background): “The typical microwave to optical conversion is based on electro-optomechanics (EOM) in a bulk optical cavity, which is difficult to operate at the quantum ground state as the mechanical cavity has a limited frequency.(302,303) An LN with the large Pockels effect enables GHz microwave to optical phot”
Coherent Conversion Between Microwave and Optical Photons—An Overview of Physical Implementations (2019, unknown): “[139] reduced the thermal noise added during upconversion, at the expense of added noise from the feedforward process.”
Cavity magnonics (2021, background): “Indeed, optomechanics has benefited from the complementary progress on the MW and optical side, culminating in the demonstration of qubit-optical transduction (Higginbotham et al., 2018; Mirhosseini et al., 2020).”
Circuit quantum electrodynamics (2020, background): “A variety of hybrid systems are currently being investigated for this purpose, including electro-optomechanical, electrooptic and magneto-optic ones (Higginbotham et al., 2018; Lambert et al., 2019; Lauk et al., 2020).”
Development of Quantum Interconnects (QuICs) for Next-Generation Information Technologies (2021, background): “Piezoelectric media [112], [140] such as LNOI, AlN, GaP, and GaAs are being considered for microwave-to-optical QFC mediated by nanomechanics, while modular approaches based on free-space cavities [141] coupled to electromechanical systems have shown the best performance thus far in terms of eff”