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arXiv:2605.22772

Magnon-mediated microwave to optical time dynamics

Rajkumar Jadhav, Xinglin Zeng, Cedric Traub, Fabian Engelhardt, Abdullah Alabbadi, Arghadeep Pal, Pascal Del'Haye, Silvia Viola Kusminskiy, Birgit Stiller

physics.opticsquant-phSubmitted May 21, 2026• Announced May 22, 2026
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Optomagnonic modulation techniques are an emerging platform for information transfer from the microwave to the optical domain. However, these techniques focus largely on the spectral domain of the transduced signal. Given the potential of the field to bridge the gap between microwave and optical signals, analyzing and studying the interactions real-time in temporal domain becomes equally essential. In this work, we exploit the optomagnonic modulation in a YIG microsphere to demonstrate and study microwave to optical real-time dynamic transfer on a time scale comparable to the decay of magnons. We inductively excite magnons in the microwave domain and use magnon-based Brillouin light scattering to transduce the signature of excited magnonic waveforms to the optical domain. The square type modulation of the magnons is retrieved in the corresponding optical sidebands. Our work enables real-time measurement of the magnonic dynamics and therefore direct access to lifetime measurements of the magnonic mode. Providing insight into the temporal dynamics of magnons, this work can open up new promising research directions such as in magnon coupled superconducting qubits or magnon-based Brillouin memory.

Comments
14 pages, 7 figures

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Optomagnonic modulation techniques are an emerging platform for information transfer from the microwave to the optical domain. However, these techniques focus largely on the spectral domain of the transduced signal. Given the potential of the field to bridge the gap between microwave and optical signals, analyzing and studying the interactions real-time in temporal domain becomes equally essential. In this work, we exploit the optomagnonic modulation in a YIG microsphere to demonstrate and study microwave to optical real-time dynamic transfer on a time scale comparable to the decay of magnons. We inductively excite magnons in the microwave domain and use magnon-based Brillouin light scattering to transduce the signature of excited magnonic waveforms to the optical domain. The square type modulation of the magnons is retrieved in the corresponding optical sidebands. Our work enables real-time measurement of the magnonic dynamics and therefore direct access to lifetime measurements of the magnonic mode. Providing insight into the temporal dynamics of magnons, this work can open up new promising research directions such as in magnon coupled superconducting qubits or magnon-based Brillouin memory.
Evidence of non-hermitian behavior has been recently demonstrated in cavity magnonics, including the emergence of mode level attraction and exceptional points in spectroscopic measurements. This work demonstrates experimental evidence of time-domain dynamics of magnon-photon systems that are coupled through a long-range interaction (i.e. remote coupling) exhibiting level attraction mediated by an auxiliary mode. We directly observe the temporal evolution of dissipatively coupled cavity-magnon modes, where heavily damped transmission line modes mediate the interaction. Our frequency-domain measurements confirm the predicted level attraction, while time-domain ring-down measurements reveal the characteristic signatures of dissipative coupling dynamics. Our approach offers in situ tunability over the dissipative coupling strength, including complete suppression, without requiring physical modifications to the experimental setup, providing a versatile platform for exploring tunable, non-Hermitian physics.
We study the quantum transduction of a superconducting qubit to an optical photon in electro-optomechanical and electro-optomagnonical systems. The electro-optomechanical system comprises a flux-tunable transmon qubit coupled to a suspended mechanical beam, which then couples to an optical cavity. Similarly, in an electro-optomagnonical system, a flux-tunable transmon qubit is coupled to an optical whispering gallery mode via a magnon excitation in a YIG ferromagnetic sphere. In both systems, the transduction process is done in sequence. In the first sequence, the qubit states are encoded in coherent excitations of phonon/magnon modes through the phonon/magnon-qubit interaction, which is non-demolition in the qubit part. We then measure the phonon/magnon excitations, which reveal the qubit states, by counting the average number of photons in the optical cavities. The measurement of the phonon/magnon excitations can be performed at a regular intervals of time.
Quantum magnonics, an emerging field focusing on the study of magnons for quantum applications, requires precise measurement methods capable of resolving single magnons. Existing techniques introduce additional dissipation channels and are not apt for magnets in free space. Brillouin light scattering (BLS) is a well-established technique for probing the magnetization known for its high sensitivity and temporal resolution. The coupling between magnons and photons is controlled by a laser input, so it can be switched off when a measurement is not needed. In this article, we theoretically investigate the efficacy of BLS for quantum tomography of magnons. We model a finite optomagnonic waveguide, including the optical noise added by the dielectric, to calculate the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). We find that the SNR is typically low due to a small magneto-optical coupling; nevertheless, it can be significantly enhanced by injecting a squeezed vacuum into the waveguide. We reconstruct the density matrix of the magnons from the statistics of the output photons using a maximum likelihood estimate. The classical component of a magnon state, defined as the regions of positive Wigner function, can be reconstructed with a high accuracy while the nonclassical component necessitates either a higher SNR or a larger data set. The latter requires more compact data structures and advanced algorithms for postprocessing. The SNR is limited partially by the input laser power that can be increased by designing the optomagnonic cavity with a heat sink.
In the emerging field of cavity optomagnonics, photons are coupled coherently to magnons in solid-state systems. These new systems are promising for implementing hybrid quantum technologies. Being able to prepare Fock states in such platforms is an essential step towards the implementation of quantum information schemes. We propose a magnon-heralding protocol to generate a magnon Fock state by detecting an optical cavity photon. Due to the peculiarities of the optomagnonic coupling, the protocol involves two distinct cavity photon modes. Solving the quantum Langevin equations of the coupled system, we show that the temporal scale of the heralding is governed by the magnon-photon cooperativity and derive the requirements for generating high fidelity magnon Fock states. We show that the nonclassical character of the heralded state, which is imprinted in the autocorrelation of an optical ``read'' mode, is only limited by the magnon lifetime for small enough temperatures. We address the detrimental effects of nonvacuum initial states, showing that high fidelity Fock states can be achieved by actively cooling the system prior to the protocol.
Quantum magnonics, an emerging field focusing on the study of magnons for quantum applications, requires precise measurement methods capable of resolving single magnons. Existing techniques introduce additional dissipation channels and are not apt for magnets in free space. Brillouin light scattering (BLS) is a well-established technique for probing the magnetization known for its high sensitivity and temporal resolution. The coupling between magnons and photons is controlled by a laser input, so it can be switched off when a measurement is not needed. In this article, we theoretically investigate the efficacy of BLS for quantum tomography of magnons. We model a finite optomagnonic waveguide, including the optical noise added by the dielectric, to calculate the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). We find that the SNR is typically low due to a small magneto-optical coupling; nevertheless, it can be significantly enhanced by injecting squeezed vacuum into the waveguide. We reconstruct the density matrix of the magnons from the statistics of the output photons using a maximum likelihood estimate. The classical component of a magnon state, defined as the regions of positive Wigner function, can be reconstructed with a high accuracy while the non-classical component necessitates either a higher SNR or a larger dataset. The latter requires more compact data structures and advanced algorithms for post-processing. The SNR is limited partially by the input laser power that can be increased by designing the optomagnonic cavity with a heat sink.
We show how a quantum state in a microwave cavity mode can be transferred to and stored in a phononic mode via an intermediate magnon mode in a magnomechanical system. For this we consider a ferrimagnetic yttrium iron garnet (YIG) sphere inserted in a microwave cavity, where the microwave and magnon modes are coupled via a magnetic-dipole interaction and the magnon and phonon modes in the YIG sphere are coupled via magnetostrictive forces. By modulating the cavity and magnon detunings and the driving of the magnon mode in time, a stimulated Raman adiabatic passage-like coherent transfer becomes possible between the cavity mode and the phonon mode. The phononic mode can be used to store the photonic quantum state for long periods as it possesses lower damping than the photonic and magnon modes. Thus our proposed scheme offers a possibility of using magnomechanical systems as quantum memory for photonic quantum information.