Non-classical mechanical states guided in a phononic waveguide

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a silicon micro-structure that guides and reflects single phonons with high lifetime, enabling advanced quantum control and potential quantum memory applications in phononics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel cavity-waveguide architecture for phonons, achieving long-lived, on-chip control of traveling single phonons in a suspended silicon structure.

Findings

Phonons exhibit a lifetime of nearly 100 μs.

Multiple round-trips of phonons observed in the waveguide.

Potential for lossless phonon transmission over tens of centimeters.

Abstract

The ability to create, manipulate and detect non-classical states of light has been key for many recent achievements in quantum physics and for developing quantum technologies. 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 present a crucial 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 demonstrates full on-chip control over traveling single phonons strongly confined in the directions transverse to the propagation axis, potentially enabling a time-encoded multimode quantum memory at telecom wavelength and advanced quantum acoustics experiments.