A single-photon emitter coupled to a phononic-crystal resonator in the resolved-sideband regime

Nat Commun. 2024 Nov 4;15(1):9509. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-53882-2.

Abstract

A promising route towards the deterministic creation and annihilation of single-phonons is to couple a single-photon emitter to a mechanical resonator. The challenge lies in reaching the resolved-sideband regime with a large coupling rate and a high mechanical quality factor. We achieve this by coupling self-assembled InAs quantum dots to a small mode-volume phononic-crystal resonator with mechanical frequency Ωm/2π = 1.466 GHz and quality factor Qm = 2.1 × 103. Thanks to the high coupling rate of gep/2π = 2.9 MHz, and by exploiting a matching condition between the effective Rabi and mechanical frequencies, we observe the interaction between the two systems via correlations in the emitted photons. Our results represent a major step towards quantum control of the mechanical resonator via a single-photon emitter.

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