Microwave-optical photon pair generation with an integrated quantum transducer

Microwave-to-optical transduction technology is a promising solution to overcome current scalability limits of microwave-frequency quantum processors. Replacing the standard coaxial wiring with low-loss optical interconnects in cryogenic setups would substantially reduce the heat-load and enable entanglement distribution within a network of remote processors via room temperature links [1]. While multiple implementations have been explored, mechanically mediated integrated transducers allow for bi-directional frequency conversion with high bandwidth and low added noise [2]. Quantum transducers can also be utilized as a direct source of microwave-optical entanglement via the two-mode squeezing interaction [3-5]. In this talk, we present the results of using our piezo-optomechanical transducer devices to generate non-classical microwave-optical states, where we measure itinerant microwave photons conditioned on an optical heralding event. This work demonstrates the utility of our transducer devices as a high bandwidth source of entanglement generation, which will be an important building block for distributed computing and networking architectures.

[1] Weaver, et al., arXiv, 2505.00542 (2025)

[2] Weaver, et al., Nat. Nano., 19, 166-172 (2024)

[3] Meesala, et al., Phys. Rev. X, 14, 031055 (2024)

[4] Jiang, et al., Nat. Phys., 19, 1423-1428 (2023)

[5] Krastanov, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 127, 040503 (2021)