A single-phonon directional coupler

Kavli Affiliate: Simon Groblacher

| First 5 Authors: Amirparsa Zivari, Niccolò Fiaschi, Lorenzo Scarpelli, Menno Jansen, Roel Burgwal

| Summary:

Integrated photonics has enabled countless technologies in
telecommunications, spectroscopy, metrology, quantum optics, and quantum
information processing. Using highly confined guided optical modes is the key
that has made integrated circuits possible and has lead to scaling of complex
designs, benefiting from their small footprint. At the same time, the field of
quantum acoustics has recently gained significant attention due to its various
potential advantages over its photonic counterparts, including smaller mode
volume, lower energy, and orders of magnitude slower propagation speeds, as
well as the potential for interconnecting distinct quantum systems. Developing
analogous integrated phononic technology is critical for realizing the full
potential of phonons and could lead to groundbreaking new applications, such as
scalable quantum computing and hybrid quantum devices. In this work, we
demonstrate for the first time a 4-port directional coupler for quantum
mechanical excitations – a crucial component for integrated phononic circuits.
Adjusting the length of the coupling region allows to realize phononic beam
splitters with varying splitting ratios. By sending a single-phonon Fock state
onto one of these phononic splitters, we demonstrate the capability of using
the directional coupler directly in the quantum regime. Our work provides an
essential step towards an integrated phononic platform for both classical and
quantum technologies applications.

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