Abstract Microwave-to-optical conversion is essential for connecting superconducting quantum processors with optical quantum networks, but detecting weak input signals typically requires operating in the strong-coupling regime with large cooperativity, which imposes stringent experimental constraints. We propose a microwave-to-optical amplifier based on a cavity optomagnonic system that operates in the weak-coupling regime, where magnon Kerr nonlinearity induces squeezing that exponentially enhances gain without sacrificing bandwidth. Squeezing-induced excess noise is suppressed by a phase-matched squeezed reservoir, enabling near-quantum-limited performance. The scheme provides a new approach for achieving high-gain, low-noise amplification under weak coupling, and can be extended to a broad range of amplifier platforms, including cavity optomechanics and electro-optic systems.
Abstract Microwave-to-optical conversion is essential for connecting superconducting quantum processors with optical quantum networks, but detecting weak input signals typically requires operating in the strong-coupling regime with large cooperativity, which imposes stringent experimental constraints. We propose a microwave-to-optical amplifier based on a cavity optomagnonic system that operates in the weak-coupling regime, where magnon Kerr nonlinearity induces squeezing that exponentially enhances gain without sacrificing bandwidth. Squeezing-induced excess noise is suppressed by a phase-matched squeezed reservoir, enabling near-quantum-limited performance. The scheme provides a new approach for achieving high-gain, low-noise amplification under weak coupling, and can be extended to a broad range of amplifier platforms, including cavity optomechanics and electro-optic systems.
High-gain amplifiers of electromagnetic signals operating near the quantum limit are crucial for quantum information systems and ultrasensitive quantum measurements.However, the existing techniques have a limited gain-bandwidth product and only operate with weak input signals.Here, we demonstrate a two-port optomechanical scheme for amplification and routing of microwave signals, a system that simultaneously performs high-gain amplification and frequency conversion in the quantum regime.Our amplifier, implemented in a two-cavity microwave optomechanical device, shows 41 dB of gain and has a high dynamic range, handling input signals up to 10 13 photons per second, 3 orders of magnitude more than corresponding Josephson parametric amplifiers.We show that although the active medium, the mechanical resonator, is at a high temperature far from the quantum limit, only 4.6 quanta of noise is added to the input signal.Our method can be readily applied to a wide variety of optomechanical systems, including hybrid optical-microwave systems, creating a universal hub for signals at the quantum level.
Quantum squeezed states, with biased quantum noise, have been widely utilized in quantum sensing and quantum error correction applications. However, generating and manipulating these nonclassical states with a large squeezing degree typically requires strong nonlinearity, which inevitably induces additional decoherence that diminishes the overall performance. Here, we demonstrate the generation and amplification of squeezed states in a superconducting microwave cavity with weak Kerr nonlinearity. By subtly engineering an off-resonant microwave drive, we observe cyclic dynamics of the quantum squeezing evolution in a displaced frame of the cavity. Furthermore, we deterministically realize quantum squeezing amplification by alternately displacing the Kerr oscillator using the Trotterization technique, achieving a maximum squeezing degree of 14.6 dB and a squeezing rate of 0.28 MHz. Our demonstrated displacement-enhanced squeezing operation offers a hardware-efficient approach for generating large squeezed states, promising potential applications in quantum-enhanced sensing and quantum information processing.
We study the directional phase-sensitive amplification between microwave and optical photons in a triple-cavity optomechanical system consisting of three cavities and one mechanical resonator. When the microwave cavity is pumped on both red and blue sidebands but the directly coupled optical cavities are only pumped on the red sidebands, directional phase-sensitive amplification can be realized by tuning the effective optomechanical couplings and the coupling strength between the optical cavities. We show that both gain and bandwidth of the amplifier can be enhanced by increasing the optomechanical cooperativities, indicating an unlimited gain-bandwidth product. Meanwhile, the proposed phase-sensitive amplifier can approach the quantum limit of zero added noise in the large cooperativity limit.
A quantum transducer converts an input signal to an output probe at a distant frequency band while maintaining the quantum information with high fidelity, which is crucial for quantum networking and distributed quantum sensing and computing. In terms of microwave–optical quantum transduction, the state-of-the-art quantum transducers suffer low transduction efficiency from weak nonlinear coupling, wherein increasing pump power to enhance efficiency inevitably leads to thermal noise from heating. Moreover, we reveal that the efficiency-bandwidth product of a cavity electro-optical or electro-optomechanical transducer is fundamentally limited by pump power and nonlinear coupling coefficient, irrespective of cavity engineering efforts. To overcome this fundamental limit, we propose to noiselessly boost the transduction efficiency by consuming intraband entanglement (e.g., microwave–microwave or optical–optical entanglement in the case of microwave–optical transduction). Via a squeezer–coupler–antisqueezer sandwich structure, the protocol enhances the transduction efficiency to unity in the ideal lossless case, given an arbitrarily weak pump and nonlinear coupling. In practical cavity systems, our entanglement-assisted protocol surpasses the non-assisted fundamental limit of the efficiency-bandwidth product and reduces the threshold cooperativity for positive quantum capacity by a factor proportional to two-mode squeezing gain. Given a fixed cooperativity, our approach increases the broadband quantum capacity by orders of magnitude. The entanglement-assisted advantage is robust to ancilla loss and cavity detuning.
We theoretically propose a scheme for realizing a quantum-limited directional amplifier in a triple-cavity optomechanical system, where one microwave cavity and two optical cavities are, respectively, coupled to a common mechanical resonator. Moreover, the two optical cavities are coupled directly to facilitate the directional amplification between microwave and optical photons. We find that directional amplification between the three cavity modes is achieved with two gain process and one conversion process, and the direction of amplification can be modulated by controlling the phase difference between the field-enhanced optomechanical coupling strengths. Furthermore, with increasing the optomechanical cooperativity, both gain and bandwidth of the directional amplifier can be enhanced, and the noise added to the amplifier can be suppressed to approach the standard quantum limit on the phase-preserving linear amplifier.
Isolation of a system from its environment is often desirable; however, dissipation can also be a useful resource. Remarkably, engineered dissipation enables the preparation and stabilization of quantum states of atoms, ions or superconducting qubits. This is achieved by a suitably engineered coupling to a dissipative cold reservoir formed by electromagnetic modes. Similarly, in the field of cavity electro- and optomechanics the control over mechanical oscillators utilizes the inherently cold dissipative nature of the electromagnetic degree of freedom. Breaking from this paradigm, recent theoretical work has considered the opposite regime in which the dissipation of the mechanical oscillator dominates and provides a cold dissipative reservoir to the electromagnetic mode. Here we report the experimental realization of this reversed dissipation regime in a microwave cavity optomechanical system and realize a quasi-instantaneous, cold reservoir for microwave light. We evidence this regime by decreasing or increasing the damping rate of the cavity on demand, that corresponds to amplification and de-amplification of the microwave field. Additionally, we observe the onset of parametric instability, i.e. the stimulated emission of microwaves (masing). Moreover, we employ the engineered cold reservoir to implement a low-noise, large-gain phase-preserving amplifier. Beyond offering the manipulation of microwave fields, such a dissipative reservoir for microwave light, when coupled to multiple cavity modes, forms the basis of microwave entanglement schemes, electromechanical amplifiers with unlimited gain-bandwidth product and dissipative quantum phase transitions. Equally important, combining such reservoir-mediated interaction with coherent dynamics allows for the realization of non-reciprocal devices, which would extend the available toolbox of quantum-limited microwave manipulation techniques.