Controlling long-lived mechanical oscillators with a superconducting qubit
| When |
Jul 22, 2025
from 11:00 to 12:00 |
|---|---|
| Where | Salle des thèses |
| Attendees |
Alkım Bozkurt |
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Mechanical oscillators in the quantum regime hold promise for applications in quantum sensing, transduction and information processing. Recent advances in piezoelectric interfaces between mechanical oscillators and superconducting qubits have enabled manipulation of non-classical states of motion with great precision. Yet, despite the progress, challenges in heterogenous integration of piezoelectric materials have limited the achievable mechanical lifetimes in such systems, constraining their broader utility. In this talk, I will present an alternative approach that harnesses the nonlinearity of electrostatic forces to engineer interactions between photons and phonons [1]. This strategy allows us to employ mechanical oscillators made of silicon, a non-piezoelectric material with extremely low acoustic loss. We reach the strong coupling regime between a transmon qubit and a long-lived mechanical oscillator with a quality-factor of around a billion [2]. We control this coupled qubit-oscillator system to generate non-classical states of motion, explore the origins of acoustic decoherence and mitigate its impact. The mechanical lifetimes, which exceed those of superconducting qubits, open new possibilities for storing microwave quantum information in motional states. Furthermore, our material-agnostic approach is broadly applicable to a variety of material platforms that possess significance for quantum science but lack a piezoelectric response.