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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics

Quantum Acoustics with Lithium Niobate Nanocavities

Patricio Arrangoiz-Arriola, E. Alex Wollack, Marek Pechal, Wentao Jiang, Zhaoyou Wang, Timothy P. McKenna, Amir H. Safavi‐Naeini

Published Jan 1, 2019• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We couple a superconducting qubit to a piezoelectric nanomechanical resonator fabricated from thin film lithium niobate (LN). The sizeable piezoelectric coefficient of LN leads to a coupling rate g/2π > 15 MHz allowing quantum operations.
DOI
10.1364/cleo_at.2019.jw4a.4

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We couple a superconducting qubit to a piezoelectric nanome-chanical resonator fabricated from thin film lithium niobate (LN). The sizeable piezoelectric coefficient of LN leads to a coupling rate g/2π>15MHzg/2\pi > 15 \text{MHz}g/2π>15MHz allowing quantum operations.
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Thin-film lithium niobate (LN) has become an enabling platform in the development of quantum integrated circuits, for applications including microwave-to-optical converters and electromechanical transducers. Incorporation of high-quality planar superconducting resonators will further elevate the performance of these devices. However, alongside the desired interactions originated from LN, its piezoelectric nature also introduces parasitic coupling between microwave and phononic modes, resulting in excessive dielectric loss. In this work, we investigate such coupling by studying niobium nitride resonators directly deposited on patterned LN thin films. By varying device configuration, we pinpoint that overlapping electric field with LN can inadvertently excite bulk acoustic modes within the substrate, inducing microwave loss independent of the acoustic dissipation rate. The experimental results are supported by simulation and theoretical modeling. Our approach can be applied to different piezoelectric systems and provide insights into the design of microwave components for quantum transduction devices.
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Piezoelectric nanomechanical resonators operating at gigahertz frequencies are a promising platform for quantum information processing and precision sensing, but phonon lifetimes have been limited to the microsecond range, widely attributed to the higher intrinsic loss of piezoelectric materials. Here we show that this limitation is not fundamental. Using a fabrication process informed by recent studies of defect-mediated loss in lithium niobate, we combine chemical restoration of ion-milled surfaces with a shadow-mask metallization process to produce lithium niobate phononic crystal resonators with inferred internal phonon lifetimes of up to 21 milliseconds at 3.6 gigahertz, corresponding to quality factors exceeding 4×1084\times10^84×108 (f⋅Qi>1018f\cdot Q_i > 10^{18}f⋅Qi​>1018) at millikelvin temperatures. By systematically varying the electrode-to-resonator spacing, we demonstrate that the measured lifetime is set by external coupling between the device and the measurement circuit rather than material loss. This establishes that lithium niobate, once fabrication-induced surface damage is removed, achieves an intrinsic quality comparable to the best mechanical materials while remaining an intrinsically piezoelectric platform with strong electromechanical coupling.
A scalable hybrid cavity quantum acoustodynamics (QAD) platform is proposed. The architecture integrates superconducting transmon qubits with phononic integrated circuits on a single chip made by a lithium niobate-on-sapphire substrate. The platform supports tightly confined and guided phononic modes in unsuspended waveguides and microring structures, while the superconducting qubits reside on the sapphire substrate. Efficient piezoelectric coupling between the phononic modes and transmon qubits can be achieved using interdigital transducers as part of the qubit’s shunt capacitance. Numerical calculations demonstrate the feasibility of achieving strong coupling between the phononic microring resonator and the transmon qubit. Remarkably, we show that a single pair of interdigital transducer fingers is sufficient to yield a coupling strength of g/2π≈1.3 MHz for the quasi-Love mode. This hybrid cavity QAD platform opens up new opportunities for quantum information processing and the study of novel quantum acoustic phenomena.