No Arabic abstract
A single-electron transistor incorporated as part of a nanomechanical resonator represents an extreme limit of electron-phonon coupling. While it allows for fast and sensitive electromechanical measurements, it also introduces backaction forces from electron tunnelling which randomly perturb the mechanical state. Despite the stochastic nature of this backaction, under conditions of strong coupling it is predicted to create self-sustaining coherent mechanical oscillations. Here, we verify this prediction using time-resolved measurements of a vibrating carbon nanotube transistor. This electromechanical oscillator has intriguing similarities with a laser. The single-electron transistor, pumped by an electrical bias, acts as a gain medium while the resonator acts as a phonon cavity. Despite the unconventional operating principle, which does not involve stimulated emission, we confirm that the output is coherent, and demonstrate other laser behaviour including injection locking and frequency narrowing through feedback.
A single Nitrogen Vacancy (NV) center hosted in a diamond nanocrystal is positioned at the extremity of a SiC nanowire. This novel hybrid system couples the degrees of freedom of two radically different systems, i.e. a nanomechanical oscillator and a single quantum object. The dynamics of the nano-resonator is probed through time resolved nanocrystal fluorescence and photon correlation measurements, conveying the influence of a mechanical degree of freedom given to a non-classical photon emitter. Moreover, by immersing the system in a strong magnetic field gradient, we induce a magnetic coupling between the nanomechanical oscillator and the NV electronic spin, providing nanomotion readout through a single electronic spin. Spin-dependent forces inherent to this coupling scheme are essential in a variety of active cooling and entanglement protocols used in atomic physics, and should now be within the reach of nanomechanical hybrid systems.
We present an analysis of the dynamics of a nanomechanical resonator coupled to a superconducting single electron transistor (SSET) in the vicinity of the Josephson quasiparticle (JQP) and double Josephson quasiparticle (DJQP) resonances. For weak coupling and wide separation of dynamical timescales, we find that for either superconducting resonance the dynamics of the resonator is given by a Fokker-Planck equation, i.e., the SSET behaves effectively as an equilibrium heat bath, characterised by an effective temperature, which also damps the resonator and renormalizes its frequency. Depending on the gate and drain-source voltage bias points with respect to the superconducting resonance, the SSET can also give rise to an instability in the mechanical resonator marked by negative damping and temperature within the appropriate Fokker-Planck equation. Furthermore, sufficiently close to a resonance, we find that the Fokker-Planck description breaks down. We also point out that there is a close analogy between coupling a nanomechanical resonator to a SSET in the vicinity of the JQP resonance and Doppler cooling of atoms by means of lasers.
Understanding ultrafast coherent electron dynamics is necessary for application of a single-electron source to metrological standards, quantum information processing, including electron quantum optics, and quantum sensing. While the dynamics of an electron emitted from the source has been extensively studied, there is as yet no study of the dynamics inside the source. This is because the speed of the internal dynamics is typically higher than 100 GHz, beyond state-of-the-art experimental bandwidth. Here, we theoretically and experimentally demonstrate that the internal dynamics in a silicon singleelectron source comprising a dynamic quantum dot can be detected, utilising a resonant level with which the dynamics is read out as gate-dependent current oscillations. Our experimental observation and simulation with realistic parameters show that an electron wave packet spatially oscillates quantum-coherently at $sim$ 200 GHz inside the source. Our results will lead to a protocol for detecting such fast dynamics in a cavity and offer a means of engineering electron wave packets. This could allow high-accuracy current sources, high-resolution and high-speed electromagnetic-field sensing, and high-fidelity initialisation of flying qubits.
We discuss two theoretical proposals for controlling the nonequilibrium steady state of nanomechanical resonators using quantum electronic transport. Specifically?, we analyse two approaches to achieve the ground-state cooling of the mechanical vibration coupled to a quantum dot embedded between (i) spin-polarised contacts or (ii) a normal metal and a superconducting contact. Assuming a suitable coupling between the vibrational modes and the charge or spin of the electrons in the quantum dot, we show that ground-state cooling of the mechanical oscillator is within the state of the art for suspended carbon nanotube quantum dots operating as electromechanical devices.
We investigate the statistics of photons emitted by tunneling electrons in a single electronic level plasmonic nanojunction. We compute the waiting-time distribution of successive emitted photons $w(tau)$. When the cavity damping rate $kappa$ is larger than the electronic tunneling rate $Gamma$, we show that in the photon-antibunching regime, $w(tau)$ indicates that the average delay-time between two successive photon emission events is given by $1/Gamma$. This is in contrast with the usually considered second-order correlation function of emitted photons, $g^{(2)}(tau)$, which displays the single time scale $1/kappa$. Our analysis shows a relevant example for which $w(tau)$ gives independent information on the photon-emission statistics with respect to $g^{(2)}(tau)$, leading to a physical insight on the problem. We discuss how this information can be extracted from experiments even in presence of a non-perfect photon detection yield.