Microwave-to-Optical Transduction with Gallium Phosphide Electro-Optomechanical Devices

Quantum computing is one of the great scientific challenges of the 21st century. Small-scalesystems today promise to surpass classical computers in the coming years and to enable thesolution of classically intractable computational tasks in the fields of quantum chemistry,optimization, cryptography and more.In contrast to classical computers, quantum computers based on superconducting quantumbits (qubits) can to date not be linked over long distance in a network to improve their computingcapacity, since devices, which preserve the quantumstate when it is transferred from onemachine to another, are not available. Several approaches are being pursued to realize such acomponent, one of themost promising to date makes use of an intermediary, micromechanicalelement that enables quantum coherent conversion between the information presentin the quantum computer and an optical fiber, without compromising the quantum natureof the information, via optomechanical interaction. This approach could allow fiber-opticquantum networks between separate quantum computers based on superconducting qubitsin the future.In this work a platformfor such a microwave-to-optic link was developed based on the piezoelectricmaterial gallium phosphide. This III-V semiconductor offers not only a piezoelectriccoupling between the electric field of a microwave circuit and a mechanicalmode, but also awide optical bandgap E_g = 2.26eV which reduces nonlinear optical absorption in the deviceand a large refractive index n(1550nm) = 3.01 which allows strong optical confinement atnear-infrared wavelengths.Importantly and in contrast to other approaches with gallium phosphide, an epitaxiallygrown, single crystal thin film of the material is integrated directly on a silicon wafer withpre-structured niobium electrodes by direct wafer-bonding. This opens up the possibility ofintegrating the device design presented here directly with superconducting qubits fabricatedwith this material system.A microwave-to-optical transducer design was simulated and fabricated in the galliumphosphideon-silicon platform. The device was found to exhibit large vacuum optomechanical couplingrates g0/2 pi ~ 290kHz and a high intrinsic optical quality factor Q >10^5 while at the same timepermitting electromechanical coupling to a microwave electrode. Coherent microwave-toopticaltransductionwas shown at room temperature for this device and the electromechanicalcoupling rate could be extracted from a model derived by input-output theory.The electromechanical coupling between the electro-optomechanical device and a superconductingqubit was estimated to be g/2 pi = O(200kHz) which indicates that strong couplingbetween the here presented device and a superconducting transmon qubit is achievable.In addition, superconducting microwave cavities with high quality factor at single photonenergy Q ~ 5x10^5 were fabricated and measured to verify that fabrication process of themicrowave-to-optical transducer is compatible with high-quality superconducting microwavecircuits.