Abstract

Microwave-to-optical transduction has received a great deal of interest from the cavity optomechanics community as a landmark application for electro-optomechanical systems. In this Letter, we demonstrate a transducer that combines high-frequency mechanical motion and a microwave cavity. The system consists of a 3D microwave cavity and a gallium arsenide optomechanical crystal, which has been placed in the microwave electric field maximum. This allows the microwave cavity to actuate the gigahertz-frequency mechanical breathing mode in the optomechanical crystal through the piezoelectric effect, which is then read out using a telecom optical mode. The gallium arsenide optomechanical crystal is a good candidate for low-noise microwave-to-telecom transduction, as it has been previously cooled to the mechanical ground state in a dilution refrigerator. Moreover, the 3D microwave cavity architecture can naturally be extended to couple to superconducting qubits and to create hybrid quantum systems.

Publication Details
Publication Type
Journal Article
Year of Publication
2020
Volume
116
Number of Pages
174005
ISSN Number
0003-6951, 1077-3118
DOI
10.1063/5.0002160
URL
http://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0002160
Journal
Applied Physics Letters
Contributors
Date Published
04/2020