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Bulletin of the American Physical Society

Cryogenic electro-optic interconnect for superconducting circuits

Itay Shomroni, Amir Youssefi, Nathan Bernier, Yash J. Joshi, Philipp Uhrich, Tobias Jan Kippenberg

Published Mar 4, 2020• 0 citations
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Abstract Encoding information onto optical fields using electro-optical modulation is the backbone of modern telecommunication networks, offering vast bandwidth and low-loss transport via optical fibers. For these reasons, optical fibers are also replacing electrical cables for short range communications within data centers. Compared to electrical coaxial cables, optical fibers also introduce two orders of magnitude smaller heat load from room to milli-Kelvin temperatures, making optical interconnects based on electro-optical modulation an attractive candidate for interfacing superconducting quantum circuits and hybrid superconducting devices. Yet, little is known about optical modulation at cryogenic temperatures. Here we demonstrate a proof-of-principle cryogenic electro-optical interconnect, showing that currently employed Ti-doped lithium niobate phase modulators are compatible with operation down to 800mK ---below the typical operation temperature of conventional microwave amplifiers based on high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs)---and maintain their room temperature Pockels coefficient. We utilize cryogenic electro-optical modulation to perform spectroscopy of a superconducting circuit optomechanical system, measuring optomechanically induced transparency (OMIT). In addition, we encode thermomechanical sidebands from the microwave domain onto an optical signal processed at room temperature. Although the currently achieved noise figure is significantly higher than that of a typical HEMT, substantial noise reduction should be attainable by harnessing recent advances in integrated modulators, by increasing the modulator length, or by using materials with a higher electro-optic coefficient, leading to noise levels on par with HEMTs. Our work highlights the potential of electro-optical modulators for massively parallel readout for emerging quantum computing or cryogenic classical computing platforms.
Advanced electro-optic processing combines electrical control with optical modulation and detection. For quantum photonic applications these processes must be carried out at the single photon level with high efficiency and low noise. Integrated quantum photonics has made great strides achieving single photon manipulation by combining key components on integrated chips which are operated by external driving electronics. Nevertheless, electrical interconnects between driving electronics and the electro-optic components, some of which require cryogenic operating conditions, can introduce parasitic effects. Here we show an all-optical interface which simultaneously delivers the operation power to, and extracts the measurement signal from, an advanced photonic circuit, namely, bias and readout of a superconducting nanowire single photon detector (SNSPD) on a single stage in a 1K cryostat. To do so, we supply all power for the single photon detector, output signal conditioning, and electro-optic readout using optical interconnects alone, thereby fully decoupling the cryogenic circuitry from the external environment. This removes the need to heatsink electrical connections, and potentially offers low-loss, high-bandwidth signal processing. This method opens the possibility to operate other advanced electrically decoupled photonic circuits such as optical control and readout of superconducting circuits, and feedforward for photonic quantum computing.
The rapid development of superconducting quantum hardware is expected to run into substantial restrictions on scalability because error correction in a cryogenic environment has stringent input-output requirements. Classical data centres rely on fibre-optic interconnects to remove similar networking bottlenecks. In the same spirit, ultracold electro-optic links have been proposed and used to generate qubit control signals, or to replace cryogenic readout electronics. So far, these approaches have suffered from either low efficiency, low bandwidth or additional noise. Here we realize radio-over-fibre qubit readout at millikelvin temperatures. We use one device to simultaneously perform upconversion and downconversion between microwave and optical frequencies and so do not require any active or passive cryogenic microwave equipment. We demonstrate all-optical single-shot readout in a circulator-free readout scheme. Importantly, we do not observe any direct radiation impact on the qubit state, despite the absence of shielding elements. This compatibility between superconducting circuits and telecom-wavelength light is not only a prerequisite to establish modular quantum networks, but it is also relevant for multiplexed readout of superconducting photon detectors and classical superconducting logic.