Published January 20, 2025 | Published
Journal Article Open

High-efficiency low-noise optomechanical crystal photon-phonon transducers

Abstract

Optomechanical crystals (OMCs) enable coherent interactions between optical photons and microwave acoustic phonons, and represent a platform for implementing quantum transduction between microwave and optical signals. Optical-absorption-induced thermal noise at cryogenic (millikelvin) temperatures is one of the primary limitations of performance for OMC-based quantum transducers. Here, we address this challenge with a two-dimensional silicon OMC resonator that is side-coupled to a mechanically detached optical waveguide, realizing a six-fold reduction in the heating rate of the acoustic resonator compared to prior state-of-the-art, while operating in a regime of high optomechanical-backaction and millikelvin base temperature. This reduced heating translates into a demonstrated phonon-to-photon conversion efficiency of 93.1±0.8% at an added noise of 0.25±0.01 quanta, representing a significant advance toward quantum-limited microwave-optical frequency conversion and optically controlled quantum acoustic memories.

Copyright and License

© 2025 Optica Publishing Group under the terms of the Optica Open Access Publishing Agreement.

Acknowledgement

The authors thank Matthew Shaw and Boris Korzh for providing single photon detectors in this work. We thank Piero Chiappina for helpful discussions. S.M. acknowledges support from the IQIM Postdoctoral Fellowship. Amazon Web Services (AWS) provided partial funding support for this work through a sponsored research grant.

Funding

Amazon Web ServicesNational Science Foundation (PHY-1125565); Army Research Office (W911NF-18-1-0103); U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science National Quantum Information Science Research Centers (Q-NEXT, DE-AC02-06CH11357); Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM)Gordon and Betty Moore FoundationKavli Nanoscience Institute at CaltechAWS Center for Quantum Computing.

Conflict of Interest

O.P. is currently employed by AWS as Director of their quantum hardware program.

Data Availability

Data underlying the results presented in this paper are not publicly available at this time but may be obtained from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Supplemental Material

See Supplement 1 for supporting content.

Files

optica-12-1-99.pdf
Files (6.3 MB)
Name Size Download all
md5:ab6f0a16ec8fe84c827fda2d0d8094a9
1.3 MB Preview Download
md5:5eb43cdabeaa7157e86d3f70497db314
5.0 MB Preview Download

Additional details

Created:
January 23, 2025
Modified:
January 23, 2025