Circuit cavity electromechanics in the strong-coupling regime

By John Teufel, Dale Li, M. Allman, Katarina Cicak, A. Sirois, J. Whittaker, Raymond W. Simmonds. Nature, 2010

691 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Demonstrating and exploiting the quantum nature of macroscopic mechanical objects would help us to investigate directly the limitations of quantum-based measurements and quantum information protocols, as well as to test long-standing questions about macroscopic quantum coherence. Central to this effort is the necessity of long-lived mechanical states. Previous efforts have witnessed quantum behaviour, but for a low-quality-factor mechanical system. The field of cavity optomechanics and electromechanics, in which a high-quality-factor mechanical oscillator is parametrically coupled to an electromagnetic cavity resonance, provides a practical architecture for cooling, manipulation and detection of motion at the quantum level. One requirement is strong coupling, in which the interaction between the two systems is faster than the dissipation of energy from either system. Here, by incorporating a free-standing, flexible aluminium membrane into a lumped-element superconducting resonant cavity, we have increased the single-photon coupling strength between these two systems by more than two orders of magnitude, compared to previously obtained coupling strengths. A parametric drive tone at the difference frequency between the mechanical oscillator and the cavity resonance dramatically increases the overall coupling strength, allowing us to completely enter the quantum-enabled, strong-coupling regime. This is evidenced by a maximum normal-mode splitting of nearly six bare cavity linewidths. Spectroscopic measurements of these ‘dressed states’ are in excellent quantitative agreement with recent theoretical predictions. The basic circuit architecture presented here provides a feasible path to ground-state cooling and subsequent coherent control and measurement of long-lived quantum states of mechanical motion.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8756240a27f06519425b0b1302e09d26fee82e5c

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Citations in the corpus

Hybrid quantum circuits: Superconducting circuits interacting with other quantum systems (2012, background): “…and Geller, 2004; Etaki et al., 2008; LaHaye et al., 2009; Liu et al., 2010; O’Connell et al., 2010; Pugnetti et al., 2009; Shevchenko et al., 2012; Sun et al., 2006; Teufel et al., 2011; Wang et al., 2008; Wei et al., 2006; Xia and Evers, 2009; Xue et al., 2007a,b,c; Zhang et al., 2009b, 2005).”
Circuit quantum electrodynamics (2020, background): “Strong coupling between mechanical motion and the LC oscillator has been demonstrated (Teufel et al., 2011b), which allowed to sideband cool the motion of the mechanical oscillator to phonon occupation number as small as nphonon ∼ 0.34.”
Quantum-coherent coupling of a mechanical oscillator to an optical cavity mode (2011, methodology): “Moreover, an electromechanical system has reached the quantum-coherent regime using parametric coupling of a megahertz micromechanical oscillator to a gigahertz microwave resonato”
Mechanical systems in the quantum regime (2011, background): “In the same type of device they also observed strong coupling between the mechanical resonator and the LC resona tor [254].”