In the 1980s, scientists measured quantized jumps in the energy of ions for the first time. In the 2000s, it was photons’ turn. Now, thanks to a tour de force of device engineering and nanofabrication, researchers at Stanford University in the US are reporting that phonons – mechanical vibrations like those that carry sound – also display this quantum behaviour.
“We could see it by eye [in the data], which was very satisfying,” team leader Amir Safavi-Naeini tells Physics World. “I’ve been fascinated with the interface between the quantum world and the classical world and trying to move that interface closer to daily experience…and now we have mechanical objects.”
Laying the groundwork
The Stanford team’s recipe for observing quantum jumps in phonons begins with thin films of lithium niobate (LiNbO3). Although bulk samples of this material had been available since the 1950s, the commercialization of thin-film LiNbO3 a decade ago was a game changer for Safavi-Naeini and his colleagues once they worked out how to process the material.
Because LiNbO3 is piezoelectric, placing it under stress – from a vibration, say – produces a voltage. This voltage allows vibrational quanta to couple to superconducting qubits, after which the qubit states can be “read out” to determine whether a phonon was present or not.
The problem was that initially, the phonons had lifetimes of only 800 nanoseconds – well short of the millisecond the team needed to observe them falling from an excited state to the ground state. Extending these phonon coherence times “took a lot of work by a number of graduate students in my group,” Safavi-Naeini says.
After probing various sources of dissipation, including material properties that cause quantum excitations to lose coherence, the researchers realized that surface defects were key offenders. They therefore switched from polymer processing, which left a residue, to shadow masks that superimpose one chip over the other and evaporate metal through it. “There were probably three generations of students that worked on getting that four to five orders of magnitude increase in the performance of the devices,” Safavi-Naeini says.
Once they’d extended their phonon lifetimes, the researchers had to find a way of combining their “very clean, long-lived” mechanical and superconducting systems without destroying either. For this, Safavi-Naeini credits past and present students Takuma Makihara and Erik Szakiel, who spent most of their PhDs tackling issues with the mechanical oscillators before finding a way to couple them to the superconducting systems. “That was the last piece,” Safavi-Naeini recalls. “Once we had that, we could do these experiments.”
Spot the missing phonon
Because the superconducting qubits detect whether an even or odd number of phonons is present in the LiNbO3 (which at very low energies amounts to determining whether a phonon is there at all), they are effectively performing a parity measurement. That could make the Stanford team’s system useful for quantum error correction, where the goal is to find out whether an error has crept in without actually measuring the quantum states, since doing so would destroy their useful quantum characteristics.
One of the most common sources of error in superconducting qubits is the loss of an excitation, such as when a phonon decays. However, if data is encoded into phonons in pairs and the system detects an odd number of them, this loss becomes apparent without measuring all the states. This so-called “binomial” code has already been implemented for microwave photons, and Safavi-Naeini explains that it works best for long-lived particles – a further benefit of the team’s long-lived phonons.
Protein and gravity measurements
The Stanford researchers are now collaborating with Michael Roukes and colleagues at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to explore possible applications in high-precision measurements of single protein masses. They are also interested in fundamental science questions such as whether it’s possible to generate entanglement between mechanical systems through gravitational fields.
However, Safavi-Naeini cautions that their phonon lifetimes would need to be much longer – a factor of 10 for error correction and mass spectrometry, and for gravity perhaps as much as six orders of magnitude, with further modifications to the experimental set-up also required – before they can achieve these goals. “The hope is that by figuring out the fundamental sources of loss in these materials we can build our way up to those experiments in the coming decade,” he says. “Every time you improve, you hit some new source of noise, you understand it, then you can deal with it, and then you go to the next one. It’s a fun physics problem.”
The research is published in Science.
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