Published September 30, 2024 | Version Published
Journal Article Open

Quantum Entanglement between Optical and Microwave Photonic Qubits

Abstract

Entanglement is an extraordinary feature of quantum mechanics. Sources of entangled optical photons were essential to test the foundations of quantum physics through violations of Bell's inequalities. More recently, entangled many-body states have been realized via strong nonlinear interactions in microwave circuits with superconducting qubits. Here, we demonstrate a chip-scale source of entangled optical and microwave photonic qubits. Our device platform integrates a piezo-optomechanical transducer with a superconducting resonator which is robust under optical illumination. We drive a photon-pair generation process and employ a dual-rail encoding intrinsic to our system to prepare entangled states of microwave and optical photons. We place a lower bound on the fidelity of the entangled state by measuring microwave and optical photons in two orthogonal bases. This entanglement source can directly interface telecom wavelength time-bin qubits and gigahertz frequency superconducting qubits, two well-established platforms for quantum communication and computation, respectively.

Copyright and License

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

Acknowledgement

The authors thank A. Butler, G. Kim, M. Mirhosseini, and A. Sipahigil for helpful discussions and B. Baker and M. McCoy for experimental support. We appreciate MIT Lincoln Laboratories for providing the traveling-wave parametric amplifier used in the microwave readout chain in our experimental setup. NbN deposition during the fabrication process was performed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Funding

This work was supported by the U.S. Army Research Office (ARO)/Laboratory for Physical Sciences (LPS) Cross Quantum Technology Systems program (Grant No. W911NF-18-1-0103), the ARO/LPS Modular Quantum Gates (ModQ) program (Grant No. W911NF-23-1-0254), the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science National Quantum Information Science Research Centers (Q-NEXT, Grant No. DE-AC02-06CH11357), the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM), an NSF Physics Frontiers Center (Grant No. PHY-1125565) with support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Kavli Nanoscience Institute at Caltech, and the AWS Center for Quantum Computing. L. J. acknowledges support from the AFRL (FA8649-21-P-0781), NSF (ERC-1941583 and OMA-2137642), and the Packard Foundation (2020-71479). S. M. acknowledges support from the IQIM Postdoctoral Fellowship.

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Additional details

Related works

Is new version of
Discussion Paper: arXiv:2312.13559 (arXiv)

Funding

United States Army Research Office
W911NF-18-1-0103
United States Army Research Office
W911NF-23-1-0254
United States Department of Energy
DE-AC02-06CH11357
Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, California Institute of Technology
NSF Physics Frontiers Center
PHY-1125565
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
Kavli Nanoscience Institute, California Institute of Technology
AWS Center for Quantum Computing
United States Air Force Research Laboratory
FA8649-21-P-0781
National Science Foundation
ERC-1941583
National Science Foundation
OMA-2137642
David and Lucile Packard Foundation
2020-71479

Dates

Accepted
2024-08-05
Accepted

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
AWS Center for Quantum Computing, Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, Kavli Nanoscience Institute
Publication Status
Published