Scalable microwave-to-optical transducers at single photon level with spins

Abstract

Microwave-to-optical transduction of single photons will play an essential role in interconnecting future superconducting quantum devices, with applications in distributed quantum computing and secure communications. Various transducers that couple microwave and optical modes via an optical drive have been developed, utilizing nonlinear phenomena such as the Pockels effect and a combination of electromechanical, piezoelectric, and optomechanical couplings. However, the limited strength of these nonlinearities, set by bulk material properties, requires the use of high quality factor resonators, often in conjunction with sophisticated nano-fabrication of suspended structures. Thus, an efficient and scalable transduction technology is still an outstanding goal. Rare-earth ion (REI) doped crystals provide high-quality atomic resonances that result in effective second-order nonlinearities stronger by many orders of magnitude compared to conventional materials. Here, we use ytterbium-171 ions doped in a YVO${}_4$ crystal at 340 ppm with an effective resonant ${\chi }^{(2)}$ nonlinearity of ~ 10${}^7$ pm/V to implement an on-chip microwave-to-optical transducer. Without an engineered optical cavity, we achieve percent-level efficiencies with an added noise as low as 1.24(9) photons. To showcase scalability, we demonstrate the interference of photons originating from two simultaneously operated transducers, enabled by the inherent absolute frequencies of the atomic transitions. These results establish REI-based transducers as a highly competitive transduction platform, provide existing REI-based quantum technologies a native link to various leading quantum microwave platforms, and pave the way toward remote transducer-assisted entanglement of superconducting quantum machines.

TX and RF contributed equally to this work

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Long optical coherence times and coherent rare earth-magnon coupling in a rare earth doped anti-ferromagnet
• Enhancement of Microwave to Optical Spin-Based Quantum Transduction via a Magnon Mode
• Hybrid classical-quantum communication networks
• Collective Radiative Enhancement of Rare-Earth Ions in Lithium Niobate via Engineered LargeArea Nanohole Arrays
• Release-free electro-optomechanical crystal modulator
• Comparing the performance of practical two-qubit gates for individual ${}^{171}$Yb ions in yttrium orthovanadate