No Arabic abstract
We report the design of a diamond-based honeycomb phononic network, in which a mechanical resonator couples to three distinct phononic crystal waveguides. This two-dimensional (2D) phononic network extends an earlier study on one-dimensional (1D) phononic networks with closed mechanical subsystems. With a special design for the phononic band structures of the waveguides, any two neighboring resonators in the 2D network and the waveguide between them can form a closed mechanical subsystem, which enables nearest neighbor coupling and at the same time circumvents the scaling problems inherent in typical large mechanical systems. In addition, the 2D network can be attached to a square phononic crystal lattice and be protected by the large band gap of the phononic crystal shield. Honeycomb phononic networks of spin qubits with nearest neighbor coupling can serve as an experimental platform for quantum computing and especially topological quantum error corrections.
Phononic quantum networks feature distinct advantages over photonic networks for on-chip quantum communications, providing a promising platform for developing quantum computers with robust solid-state spin qubits. Large mechanical networks including one-dimensional chains of trapped ions, however, have inherent and well-known scaling problems. In addition, chiral phononic processes, which are necessary for conventional phononic quantum networks, are difficult to implement in a solid-state system. To overcome these seemingly unsolvable obstacles, we have developed a new network architecture that breaks a large mechanical network into small and closed mechanical subsystems. This architecture is implemented in a diamond phononic nanostructure featuring alternating phononic crystal waveguides with specially-designed bandgaps. The implementation also includes nanomechanical resonators coupled to color centers through phonon-assisted transitions as well as quantum state transfer protocols that can be robust against the thermal environment.
Quantum optics - the creation, manipulation and detection of non-classical states of light - is a fundamental cornerstone of modern physics, with many applications in basic and applied science. Achieving the same level of control over phonons, the quanta of vibrations, could have a similar impact, in particular on the fields of quantum sensing and quantum information processing. Here we demonstrate the first step towards this level of control and realize a single-mode waveguide for individual phonons in a suspended silicon micro-structure. We use a cavity-waveguide architecture, where the cavity is used as a source and detector for the mechanical excitations, while the waveguide has a free standing end in order to reflect the phonons. This enables us to observe multiple round-trips of the phonons between the source and the reflector. The long mechanical lifetime of almost 100 $mu s$ demonstrates the possibility of nearly lossless transmission of single phonons over, in principle, tens of centimeters. Our experiment represents the first demonstration of full on-chip control over traveling single phonons strongly confined in the directions transverse to the propagation axis and paves the way to a time-encoded multimode quantum memory at telecom wavelength and advanced quantum acoustics experiments.
We report the design and fabrication of diamond spin-mechanical resonators embedded in a two-dimensional (2D) phononic crystal square lattice. The rectangular resonator features GHz in-plane compression modes protected by the phononic band gap of the square lattice. A membrane-in-bulk approach is developed for the fabrication of the suspended 2D structure. This approach overcomes the limitations of the existing approaches, which are either incompatible with the necessary high-temperature thermal annealing or unsuitable for 2D structures with the required feature size. Graded soft oxygen etching, with the etching rate decreased gradually to below 1 nm/minute, is used to remove defective surface layers damaged by reactive ion etching. Combining the graded etching with other established surface treatment techniques reduces the optical linewidth of nitrogen vacancy centers in resonators with a thickness below 1 micron to as narrow as 330 MHz.
In quantum optomechanics, finding materials and strategies to limit losses has been crucial to the progress of the field. Recently, superfluid 4He was proposed as a promising mechanical element for quantum optomechanics. This quantum fluid shows highly desirable properties (e.g. extremely low acoustic loss) for a quantum optomechanical system. In current implementations, superfluid optomechanical systems suffer from external sources of loss, which spoils the quality factor of resonators. In this work, we propose a new implementation, exploiting nanofluidic confinement. Our approach, based on acoustic resonators formed within phononic nanostructures, aims at limiting radiation losses to preserve the intrinsic properties of superfluid 4He. In this work, we estimate the optomechanical system parameters. Using recent theory, we derive the expected quality factors for acoustic resonators in different thermodynamic conditions. We calculate the sources of loss induced by the phononic nanostructures with numerical simulations. Our results indicate the feasibility of the proposed approach in a broad range of parameters, which opens new prospects for more complex geometries.
Molecules constitute compact hybrid quantum optical systems that can interface photons, electronic degrees of freedom, localized mechanical vibrations and phonons. In particular, the strong vibronic interaction between electrons and nuclear motion in a molecule resembles the optomechanical radiation pressure Hamiltonian. While molecular vibrations are often in the ground state even at elevated temperatures, one still needs to get a handle on decoherence channels associated with phonons before an efficient quantum optical network based on opto-vibrational interactions in solid-state molecular systems could be realized. As a step towards a better understanding of decoherence in phononic environments, we take here an open quantum system approach to the non-equilibrium dynamics of guest molecules embedded in a crystal, identifying regimes of Markovian versus non-Markovian vibrational relaxation. A stochastic treatment based on quantum Langevin equations predicts collective vibron-vibron dynamics that resembles processes of sub- and superradiance for radiative transitions. This in turn leads to the possibility of decoupling intramolecular vibrations from the phononic bath, allowing for enhanced coherence times of collective vibrations. For molecular polaritonics in strongly confined geometries, we also show that the imprint of opto-vibrational couplings onto the emerging output field results in effective polariton cross-talk rates for finite bath occupancies.