Interfacing superconducting qubits with optical photons requires noise-free microwave-to-optical transducers, a technology currently not realized at the single-photon level. We propose to use four-wave-mixing in an ensemble of cold ytterbium (Yb) atoms prepared in the metastable 'clock' state. The parametric process uses two high-lying Rydberg states for bidirectional conversion between a 10 GHz microwave photon and an optical photon in the telecommunication E-band. To avoid noise photons due to spontaneous emission, we consider continuous operation far detuned from the intermediate states. We use an input-output formalism to predict conversion efficiencies of ≈50% with bandwidths of ≈100 kHz.
@article{arxiv.1904.08999,
title = {Microwave-to-optical conversion via four-wave-mixing in a cold ytterbium ensemble},
author = {Jacob P. Covey and Alp Sipahigil and Mark Saffman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.08999},
year = {2019}
}