3:30 pm
MCP 201 933 East 56th Street
Chicago IL 60637
https://clelandlab.uchicago.edu
My research group has been developing technology enabling controlled experiments on phonons, the quanta of sound. We can create and store individual phonons in a mechanical resonator; generate quantum entangled states between phonons in two physically separated mechanical resonators; use phonons to transmit quantum states; and generate quantum entanglement through the sharing of “half-phonons”. By building a single-phonon interferometer, analogous to its optical counterpart, we have also demonstrated the acoustic version of the Hong-Ou-Mandel effect, with its signature of quantum interference. These various advances point to the possibility of building a phonon-based quantum computer, in which phonons, generated as “throw-away” qubits, can in principle allow inexpensive scaling to a very large quantum computer.