Cavity Optomechanics

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Overview

Phonons are long-lived solid-state excitations that can be harnessed to realize scalable technologies for quantum sensing, transduction, and storage. Using cavity optomechanical techniques, engineerable forms of photon-phonon coupling can be exploited to control long-lived phonons at the quantum level. These capabilities unlock new ways to encode, process, and preserve quantum information in the mechanical domain.

Our team has pioneered new strategies to access and control long-lived gigahertz-frequency phonons in the quantum regime.  Using Brillouin interactions to create efficient photon-phonon coupling, our team has recently demonstrated laser-based ground-state cooling of ultra-long-lived phonons supported by bulk acoustic wave resonators. Our next experiments are focused on encoding and storing quantum information in such phonon modes to enable optomechanical quantum memories, single photon sources, and quantum transducers for future quantum computing, sensing, and communications applications.

Related Papers

Quantum optomechanical control of long-lived bulk acoustic phonons
Hilel Hagai Diamandi, Yizhi Luo, David Mason, Tevfik Bulent Kanmaz, Sayan Ghosh, Margaret Pavlovich, Taekwan Yoon, Ryan Behunin, Shruti Puri, Jack G. E. Harris, Peter T. Rakich
arXiv:2410.18037

Optomechanical resource for fault-tolerant quantum computing
Margaret Pavlovich, Peter Rakich, Shruti Puri
arXiv:2505.00768 (2025)

Multimode strong coupling in cavity optomechanics
Prashanta Kharel, Yiwen Chu, David Mason, Eric A. Kittlaus, Nils T. Otterstrom, Shai Gertler, Peter T. Rakich
Phys. Rev. Applied 18, 024054 (2022)

High-frequency cavity optomechanics using bulk acoustic phonons
Prashanta Kharel, Glen I. Harris, Eric A. Kittlaus, William H. Renninger, Nils T. Otterstrom, Jack G. E. Harris, Peter T. Rakich
Science Advances, Vol. 5, Issue 4, eaav0582 (2019)
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aav0582

Ultra-high-Q phononic resonators on-chip at cryogenic temperatures
Prashanta Kharel, Yiwen Chu, Michael Power, William H. Renninger, Robert J. Schoelkopf, Peter T. Rakich
APL Photonics, 3, 066101 (2018)

Bulk crystalline optomechanics
W. H. Renninger, P. Kharel, R. O. Behunin, P. T. Rakich
DOI: 10.1038/s41567-018-0090-3

Lifetime-limited Gigahertz-frequency Mechanical Oscillators with Millisecond Coherence Times Yizhi Luo, Hilel Hagai Diamandi, Hanshi Li, Runjiang Bi, David Mason, Taekwan Yoon, Xinghan Guo, Hanlin Tang, Ryan O. Behunin, Frederick J. Walker, Charles Ahn, Peter T. Rakich arXiv:2504.07523

Creation and control of multi-phonon Fock states in a bulk acoustic-wave resonator
Yiwen Chu, Prashanta Kharel, Taekwan Yoon, Luigi Frunzio, Peter T. Rakich, Robert J. Schoelkopf
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0717-7

Quantum acoustics with superconducting qubits
Yiwen Chu, Prashanta Kharel, William H. Renninger, Luke D. Burkhart, Luigi Frunzio, Peter T. Rakich, Robert J. Schoelkopf
Science, Vol. 358, Issue 6360, pp. 199–202 (2017)
DOI: 10.1126/science.aao1511

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