Towards quantum interconnects: entangling microwave and optical photonic qubits

Abstract:

Modern computing and communication technologies such as supercomputers and the internet are based on optically linked networks of information processors operating at microwave frequencies. An analogous architecture has been proposed for quantum networks using optical photons to distribute entanglement between remote superconducting quantum processors. Here I will discuss our recent demonstration of a chip-scale source of entangled optical and microwave photonic qubits, an essential milestone towards realizing such an architecture. Our device platform integrates a piezo-optomechanical transducer with a superconducting resonator which is robust under optical illumination. We drive a photon-pair generation process and employ a dual-rail encoding to prepare entangled states of microwave and optical photons. This entanglement source can directly interface telecom wavelength time-bin qubits and GHz frequency superconducting qubits, two well-established platforms for quantum communication and computation, respectively