Fundamental breakthrough in the processing of quantum and classical information

Working with theorists at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, researchers at the United States Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have achieved unprecedented scientific control in the genre. They demonstrated a new approach that allows real-time control of interactions between photons and microwave magnons, potentially leading to advances in electronic devices and quantum signal processing.

Microwave photons are elementary particles that form the electromagnetic waves that we use for wireless communications. On the other hand, magnons are the elementary particles that form what scientists call “spin waves” – wave-like disturbances in an ordered array of microscopic aligned spins that can occur in certain magnetic materials.

The microwave photon-magnon interaction has emerged in recent years as a promising platform for classical and quantum information processing. However, this interaction has proven to be impossible to manipulate in real time, until now.

“Before our discovery, controlling photon-magnon interaction was like shooting an arrow into the air,” said Xufeng Zhang, an assistant scientist at the Nanoscale Materials Center, a DOE user facility in Argonne, and the corresponding author of this work. . “You don’t have any control over that arrow once in flight.”

The team’s discovery changed that. “Now, it’s more like flying a drone, where we can guide and control its flight electronically,” said Zhang.

By intelligent engineering, the team employs an electrical signal to periodically change the vibrational frequency of the magnon and thereby induce effective magnon-photon interaction. The result is the first magnetic microwave device with the ability to adjust on demand.

The team’s device can control the intensity of the photon-magnon interaction at any point while information is being transferred between photons and magnons. It can even enable and disable interaction completely. With this adjustability, scientists can process and manipulate information in ways that go far beyond today’s hybrid hybrid devices.

“Researchers have been looking for a way to control this interaction in recent years,” noted Zhang. The team’s discovery opens a new direction for the processing of magnesium-based signals and should lead to electronic devices with new features. It can also allow important applications for quantum signal processing, where microwave microwave interactions are being explored as a promising candidate for the transfer of information between different quantum systems.

The DOE Office of Basic Energy Sciences supported this research, which was published in Physical review letters.