Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Reed, A. P.
• Mayer, K. H.
• Teufel, J. D.
• Burkhart, L. D.
• Pfaff, W.
• Reagor, M.
• Sletten, L.
• Ma, X.
• Schoelkopf, R. J.
• Knill, E.
• Lehnert, K. W.

Titel

Faithful conversion of propagating quantum information to mechanical motion

Ist Teil von

• Nature physics, 2017-12, Vol.13 (12), p.1163-1167

Ort / Verlag

London: Nature Publishing Group UK

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Combining micrometre-sized mechanical resonators with superconducting quantum circuits, quantum information encoded with photons now can be converted to the motion of a macroscopic object. The motion of micrometre-sized mechanical resonators can now be controlled and measured at the fundamental limits imposed by quantum mechanics. These resonators have been prepared in their motional ground state 1 , 2 , 3 or in squeezed states 4 , 5 , 6 , measured with quantum-limited precision 7 , and even entangled with microwave fields 8 . Such advances make it possible to process quantum information using the motion of a macroscopic object. In particular, recent experiments have combined mechanical resonators with superconducting quantum circuits to frequency-convert, store and amplify propagating microwave fields 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 . But these systems have not been used to manipulate states that encode quantum bits (qubits), which are required for quantum communication and modular quantum computation 13 , 14 . Here we demonstrate the conversion of propagating qubits encoded as superpositions of zero and one photons to the motion of a micromechanical resonator with a fidelity in excess of the classical bound. This ability is necessary for mechanical resonators to convert quantum information between the microwave and optical domains 15 , 16 , 17 or to act as storage elements in a modular quantum information processor 12 , 13 , 18 . Additionally, these results are an important step towards testing speculative notions that quantum theory may not be valid for sufficiently massive systems 19 .