Physicists count sound particles with quantum microphone

Phys.org  July 27, 2019
Researchers at Stanford University built a hybrid platform that integrates nanomechanical piezoelectric resonators with a microwave superconducting qubit on the same chip. They excited the phonons with resonant pulses and probed the resulting excitation spectrum of the qubit to observe phonon-number-dependent frequency shifts that are about five times larger than the qubit linewidth. The result demonstrated a fully integrated platform for quantum acoustics that combines large couplings, considerable coherence times and excellent control over the mechanical mode structure. With modest experimental improvements, the approach could enable quantum nondemolition measurements of phonons and will lead to quantum sensors and information-processing approaches that use chip-scale nanomechanical devices…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE

Different phonon numbers are visible as distinct peaks in the qubit spectrum, which are shown schematically behind the resonators. Credit: Wentao Jiang

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