Microwave to optical transduction has received a great deal of interest from the cavity optomechanics community as a landmark application for electro-optomechanical systems. In this Letter, we demonstrate a novel transducer that combines high-frequency mechanical motion and a microwave cavity for the first time. The system consists of a 3D microwave cavity and a gallium arsenide optomechanical crystal, which has been placed in the microwave electric field maximum. This allows the microwave cavity to actuate the gigahertz-frequency mechanical breathing mode in the optomechanical crystal through the piezoelectric effect, which is then read out using a telecom optical mode. The gallium arsenide optomechanical crystal is a good candidate for low-noise microwave-to-telecom transduction, as it has been previously cooled to the mechanical ground state in a dilution refrigerator. Moreover, the 3D microwave cavity architecture can naturally be extended to couple to superconducting qubits and to create hybrid quantum systems.
@article{arxiv.2002.00471,
title = {Wavelength transduction from a 3D microwave cavity to telecom using piezoelectric optomechanical crystals},
author = {H. Ramp and T. J. Clark and B. D. Hauer and C. Doolin and K. C. Balram and K. Srinivasan and J. P. Davis},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.00471},
year = {2020}
}