Coherent Control of a Carbon Nanotube Mechanical Mode under Tunable Coupling with Orbital States (Part 2)

We demonstrate gate-tunable control of orbital-mechanical hybridization in a suspended carbon nanotube within a cQED architecture. By applying fast adiabatic electric field pulses, we dynamically decouple the mechanical mode from the electronic orbitals, sweeping between hybridized and purely mechanical regimes.

In part 2 of this talk, we show how this tunable coupling enables independent control of drive strength and decoherence rates. Pulsing to the decoupled mechanical regime enhances the relaxation time by nearly two orders of magnitude (from T₁ = 40 μs to T₁ = 3 ms) and triples the coherence time (from T₂* = 20 μs to T₂* = 60 μs).

These results position mechanical vibrations in carbon nanotubes as potential quantum memories for qubits encoded in the electronic and spin degrees of freedom.