Routing of propagating microwave phonons at the quantum level

It has recently been shown that surface acoustic waves (SAWs) can interact with artificial atoms at the quantum level. This has opened up new possibilities for utilizing SAWs (phonons) instead of electromagnetic waves (photons). Here we explore routing of propagating phonons using SAW scattering from an artificial atom, an analogy to previous experiments performed using photons in quantum optics. The SAW phonons have a five orders of magnitude slower speed than photons in vacuum, which results in ample time for inflight manipulations of the propagating phonons. The artificial atom can be tuned on or off resonance with the incident SAW field using an external magnetic field or the Autler-Townes splitting, and thus the reflection and transmission of the SAW field can be controlled. On resonance, we observe a 96 % extinction in the transmission of the low power continuous signal. The possibilities to also route short (100 ns) pulses further enables experiments where an acoustic pulse is captured between two artificial atoms and released in a controlled way.