Cooling radio waves to their quantum ground state

Phys.org  October 15, 2021
In standard cryogenic systems thermal decoherence prevents access to the quantum regime for photon frequencies below the gigahertz domain. An international team of researchers (the Netherlands, Germany) engineered two superconducting LC circuits coupled by a photon-pressure interaction and demonstrated sideband cooling of a hot radio frequency (RF) circuit using a microwave cavity. Because of a substantially increased coupling strength, they obtained a large single-photon quantum cooperativity and reduced the thermal RF occupancy by 75% with less than one pump photon. For larger pump powers, the coupling rate exceeds the RF thermal decoherence rate by a factor of 3, and the RF circuit is cooled into the quantum ground state. Their results lay the foundation for RF quantum photonics…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE 

Credit: Delft University of Technology

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