Toward engineered quantum many-body phonon systems

Abstract

Arrays of coupled phonon cavities each including an impurity qubit in silicon are considered. We study experimentally feasible architectures that can exhibit quantum many-body phase transitions of phonons, e.g. Mott insulator and superfluid states, due to a strong phonon-phonon interaction (which is mediated by the impurity qubit-cavity phonon coupling). We investigate closed equilibrium systems as well as driven dissipative non-equilibrium systems at zero and non-zero temperatures. Our results indicate that quantum many-body phonon systems are achievable both in on-chip nanomechanical systems in silicon and distributed Bragg reflector phonon cavity heterostructures in silicon-germanium. Temperature and driving field are shown to play a critical role in achieving these phonon superfluid and insulator states, results that are also applicable to polariton systems. Experimental procedures to detect these states are also given. Cavity-phoniton systems enable strong phonon-phonon interactions as well as offering long wavelengths for forming extended quantum states; they may have some advantage in forming truly quantum many-body mechanical states as compared to other optomechanical systems.

7 pages, 5 figures

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Universal Quantum Transducers based on Surface Acoustic Waves
• Reconfigurable photon sources based on quantum plexcitonic systems
• Simulating systems of itinerant spin-carrying particles using arrays of superconducting qubits and resonators
• Superfluid-Mott insulator quantum phase transition in a cavity optomagnonic system