High-efficiency low-noise optomechanical crystal photon-phonon transducers
Creators
-
1.
California Institute of Technology
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 Services; National 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 Foundation; Kavli Nanoscience Institute at Caltech; AWS 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 |
|---|---|---|
|
md5:5eb43cdabeaa7157e86d3f70497db314
|
5.0 MB | Preview Download |
|
md5:ab6f0a16ec8fe84c827fda2d0d8094a9
|
1.3 MB | Preview Download |
Additional details
Related works
- Is new version of
- Discussion Paper: arXiv:2406.15701 (arXiv)
- Is supplemented by
- Supplemental Material: 10.6084/m9.figshare.27948360 (DOI)
Funding
- Amazon (United States)
- Amazon Web Services
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-1125565
- United States Army Research Office
- W911NF-18-1-0103
- United States Department of Energy
- DE-AC02-06CH11357
- Institute for Quantum Information and Matter
- Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
- Kavli Nanoscience Institute at Caltech
- AWS Center for Quantum Computing
Dates
- Accepted
-
2024-12-01Accepted
- Available
-
2025-01-17Published