Ground-state cooling, quantum squeezing, and remote entanglement of mechanical oscillators are just a few of the advances made possible by optomechanics. Pioneering theoretical studies have predicted that optomechanical lattices can access significantly richer physics and novel dynamics, such as quantum collective dynamics and topological phenomena. However, reproducing such devices experimentally under strict control and building optomechanical lattices capable of hosting multiple coupled optical and mechanical degrees of freedom has proven difficult.
The first large-scale and configurable superconducting circuit optomechanical lattice that can overcome the scaling challenges of quantum optomechanical systems has been built by researchers. The researchers created an optomechanical strained graphene lattice and used novel measurement techniques to investigate non-trivial topological edge states.
They have created a nanofabrication technique for superconducting circuit optomechanical systems with high reproducibility and extremely tight tolerances on individual device parameters. This allows us to engineer the various sites to be nearly identical, as in a natural lattice.
The team’s measurements closely match theoretical predictions, demonstrating that the new platform is a reliable testbed for studying topological physics in one and two-dimensional lattices. The demonstration of optomechanical lattices not only opens the possibility of studying many-body physics in such realizations of condensed matter lattice models, but it also opens the door to novel hybrid quantum systems when combined with superconducting qubits.
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