Overcoming intrinsic material limitations through cavity feedback

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that active microwave feedback can significantly reduce linewidths in cavity-magnon polaritons, enabling strong coupling with phonons and overcoming material limitations in hybrid quantum systems.

Contribution

The study introduces a feedback technique to surpass intrinsic material dissipation limits, achieving strong magnon-phonon coupling and three-mode hybridization.

Findings

Enhanced polariton-phonon cooperativity from C=1 to C=150

Observation of normal-mode splitting indicating strong coupling

Suppression of linewidths below magnon-limited linewidth

Abstract

Magnons, the quanta of spin waves, have significant potential for use in modern technologies, especially when strongly coupled to another mode for read-out and control. However, while magnons strongly interact with microwave photons via the magnetic-dipole interaction to form hybrid cavity-magnon polariton modes, the weak magnetostrictive magnon-phonon interaction, together with large polariton linewidths dominated by magnon dissipation, has so far restricted magnonic-spheres to the weak-coupling regime. The material-limited magnon dissipation rate in particular has been regarded as an unavoidable limitation in these systems. Here, we surpass this long-standing limitation by implementing an active microwave feedback loop to suppress the linewidth of cavity-magnon polaritons and strongly suppress their effective decay rate below the magnon-limited linewidth, thereby enhancing the polariton-phonon cooperativity from C=1 to C=150. As a key milestone, we achieve normal-mode splitting between a cavity-magnon polariton and a mechanical mode, providing direct evidence of three-mode hybridization among photons, magnons, and phonons. Our results establish feedback as a general route to accessing strong-coupling regimes in systems previously thought to be limited by material properties and hence open new opportunities for coherent control in hybrid quantum systems.