RAC1 Journal Club/Seminar Series

Surface Acoustic Waves in Quantum Systems

Mats Powlowski

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Surface acoustic waves (SAWs) are acoustic phonons that travel along the surface of a material and have been used for a wide variety of purposes, from RF filters to acoustic cavities to biosensors. Recently, there has been a great interest in using SAWs with existing quantum systems. I will review two recent papers that use SAWs for interesting purposes. In Appl. Phys. Lett. 111, 011103 (2017), SAWs are used to convert quantum dots in micropillars to single photon sources. In Nat. Comm. 8:975 (2017), transmon qubits are coupled to a SAW cavity which can be used to observe interesting effects by taking advantage of the characteristics of SAWs.