Quantum transduction with mechanical oscillators

Julian Delgado

Jialun Luo, Hil Fung Harry Cheung, Yogesh Sharad Patil +1 more

Mrittunjoy Guha Majumdar

Konrad W. Lehnert

Wei Wan, Han Wu, Liang Chen +3 more

A single trapped ion driven away from the equilibrium position behaves like a Duffing oscillator. We demonstrate in a homebuilt surface-electrode trap (SET) the motion transduction of a trapped-ion oscillator from one dimension to another along with amplification of motional amplitudes and energies under the full control of the radio-frequency drive voltage. The phenomena, originated from different layouts and fabrication asymmetry of the SET, can be understood by complicated Duffing nonlinear equations. Our scheme provides an effective mechanism to investigate very complicated nonlinear behavior in trapped-ion setups and is expected to have extensive applications.

Yu-Bo Hou, Xiaoan Ai, Pengbo Li +1 more

Quantum transduction, which coherently converts quantum states between microwave and optical frequency domains, is a key technology for hybrid quantum architectures. Its performance, however, is fundamentally limited by thermal noise. Direct quantum transduction is particularly susceptible to noise and often fails to achieve positive quantum capacity. Entanglement-based quantum transduction, which realizes state conversion through quantum teleportation assisted by microwave-optical entanglement, is intrinsically more robust against thermal noise. However, generating sufficiently strong entanglement in a realistic thermal environment remains a major challenge. In this paper, we exploit correlated noise as a resource for quantum transduction. For direct quantum transduction, it is shown that the noise correlations give rise to controllable interference terms that substantially suppress the effective channel noise. For entanglement-based quantum transduction, the same correlations enhance the generation of microwave-optical entanglement, thereby improving the fidelity of teleportation-based conversion. As a result, both transduction protocols exhibit broad regions of positive quantum capacity over experimentally relevant ranges of cooperativity. We further discuss a possible physical mechanism for engineering the required noise correlations, providing theoretical guidance for experimental implementations. These results suggest that correlated noise can substantially relax the stringent cryogenic requirements for microwave-optical quantum transduction and facilitate the realization of practical hybrid quantum networks.