Mechanical resonators for storage and transfer of electrical and optical quantum states

Abstract

We study an optomechanical system in which a microwave field and an optical field are coupled to a common mechanical resonator. We explore methods that use these mechanical resonators to store quantum mechanical states and to transduce states between the electromagnetic resonators from the perspective of the effect of mechanical decoherence. Besides being of fundamental interest, this coherent quantum state transfer could have important practical implications in the field of quantum information science, as it potentially allows one to overcome intrinsic limitations of both microwave and optical platforms. We discuss several state transfer protocols and study their transfer fidelity using a fully quantum mechanical model that utilizes quantum state-diffusion techniques. This work demonstrates that mechanical decoherence should not be an insurmountable obstacle in realizing high fidelity storage and transduction.

High-efficiency quantum state transfer and quantum memory using a mechanical oscillator

“…(13) and (14) were also derived invoking the destructive interference condition for the cancellation of the back-reflected field into the environ ment [7,10], To analyze the quantum state transfer when the cavities and the mechanical oscillators are coupled to vacuum (zero temperature environment), it is sufficient to use the corresponding classical equations for Eqs. (7)-(9):…”

Self-sustained oscillation and harmonic generation in optomechanical systems with quadratic couplings

“…Moreover, in the last few years nonlinear couplings have become an important aspect of many electro-and optomechanical systems, such as superconducting nanoelectromechanics [35], a membrane in the middle of deformed cavities [40][41][42], a two-mode coupled optomechanical cavity [43], a vibrating suspended nanomechanical beam [44], an optically levitated nanosphere [45], photonic crystals [46], phonon-induced EIT [47,48], and cavity Bose-Einstein condensate [49] or ultracold atoms [50], in the context of exploring quantumstate control [32,51,52], weak-signal measurement [53][54][55], or quantum information storage [56][57][58]. As the importance of the nonlinear features of phonon-photon coupling, particularly in the case of a large displacement or strong driven field, it is essential to understand the dynamical influence on these systems in the presence of both linear and quadratic couplings, which, recently, has been demonstrated experimentally [41,42] but has not yet been investigated theoretically.…”

Continuous-variable dense coding by optomechanical cavities

“…Very recently, it has been shown how mechanical resonators can be used as a novel tool for generating strong continuous-variable (CV) entanglement [26], which may involve optical modes at different wavelengths [22,27,28]. Such strong CV entanglement can therefore be exploited to implement quantum information tasks, like dense coding as studied in this paper.…”