Central discovery in quantum and classical information processing

In collaboration with theorists at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, researchers from the US Department of Energy (DOE)’s Argonne National Laboratory have achieved scientific control that is the first of its kind. They have introduced a new approach that allows the interaction between microwave photos and magnons to be controlled in real time, which could potentially lead to advances in electronic devices and processing of quantum signals.

Microwave photons are elementary particles that form the electromagnetic waves we use for wireless communication. On the other hand, magnons are the elementary particles that form what scientists call ‘spin waves’ – wave-like disturbances in an ordered series of microscopically aligned turns that can occur in certain magnetic materials.

Microwave-photon-magnon interaction has emerged in recent years as a promising platform for both classical and quantum processing. This interaction has so far been impossible to manipulate in real time.

“Before our discovery, controlling the photon-magnon interaction was like shooting an arrow into the air,” said Xufeng Zhang, an assistant scientist at the Center for Nanoscale Materials, a DOE user facility at Argonne. and the corresponding author of this work said. ‘One did not control the arrow once at all during the flight. ‘

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

Through clever engineering, the team uses an electrical signal to change the magnon vibration frequency from time to time, thus achieving effective magnon-photon interaction. The result is a very first microwave-magnetonic device with adjustability on demand.

The team device can control the strength of the photon-magnon interaction at any point, as information is transferred between photons and magnons. It can even turn the interaction on and off completely. With this tuning feature, scientists can process and manipulate information in ways that far surpass the current hybrid magnonic devices.

“Researchers have been looking for a way to control this interaction for the past few years,” Zhang noted. The discovery of the team opens up a new direction for magneto-based signal processing and should lead to electronic devices with new features. It can also enable important applications for quantum signal processing, where microwave-magnonic interactions are investigated as a promising candidate for the transfer of information between different quantum systems.

The DOE Office of Basic Energy Sciences supports this research, published in 2008 Physical overview letters.