Superconducting parametric amplifiers are crucial components in microwave quantum circuits for enabling quantum-limited signal readout. The best-performing such amplifiers are oftenbased on Josephson junctions, which however are sensitive to magnetic fields. Therefore, they require magnetic shields and are not easily integratable with other quantum systems that operates within magnetic fields, such as spin ensemble quantum memories. To tackle this challenge, we have developed a kinetic inductance-based parametric amplifier featuring a NbN nanobridge instead of Josephson Junctions, which provides the desired nonlinearity for a strong parametric gain up to 42 dB. The added noise of this nanobridge kinetic-inductance parametric amplifier (hereby referred as NKPA) is calibrated and found to be 0.59±0.03 quanta for phase-preserving amplification, approaching the quantum limit of 0.5 quanta. Most importantly, we show that such excellent noise performance is preserved in an in-plane magnetic field up to 427 mT, the maximum field available in our experiment. This magnetic field-resilient parametric amplifier presents an opportunity towards addressing single electron-spin resonance and more efficient search for Axions as well as Majorana Fermions.
Coherent photon conversion between microwave and optics holds promise for the realization of distributed quantum networks, in particular, the architecture that incorporates superconductingquantum processors with optical telecommunication channels. High-frequency gigahertz piezo-mechanics featuring low thermal excitations offers an ideal platform to mediate microwave-optical coupling. However, integrating nanophotonic and superconducting circuits at cryogenic temperatures to simultaneously achieve strong photon-phonon interactions remains a tremendous challenge. Here, we report the first demonstration of an integrated superconducting cavity piezo-optomechanical converter where 10-GHz phonons are resonantly coupled with photons in a superconducting microwave and a nanophotonic cavities at the same time. Benefited from the cavity-enhanced interactions, efficient bidirectional microwave-optical photon conversion is realized with an on-chip efficiency of 0.07% and an internal efficiency of 5.8%. The demonstrated superconducting piezo-optomechanical interface makes a substantial step towards quantum communication at large scale, as well as novel explorations in hybrid quantum systems such as microwave-optical photon entanglement and quantum sensing.
Leveraging the quantum information processing ability of superconducting circuits and long-distance distribution ability of optical photons promises the realization of complex and large-scalequantum networks. In such a scheme, a coherent and efficient quantum transducer between superconducting and photonic circuits is critical. However, such quantum transducer is still challenging since the use of intermediate excitations in current schemes introduces extra noise and limits bandwidth. Here we realize direct and coherent transduction between superconducting and photonic circuits based on triple-resonance electro-optics principle, with integrated devices incorporating both superconducting and optical cavities on the same chip. Electromagnetically induced transparency is observed, indicating the coherent interaction between microwave and optical photons. Internal conversion efficiency of 25.9\pm0.3\% has been achieved, with 2.05\pm0.04\% total efficiency. Superconducting cavity electro-optics offers broad transduction bandwidth and high scalability, and represents a significant step towards the integrated hybrid quantum circuits and distributed quantum computation.