Microscopic drum could link electromagnetic, mechanical motion at quantum level

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) claim the microscopic apparatus which can process information, could potentially control the motion of a relatively large object at the smallest possible, or quantum, scale. During experiments, researchers created strong interactions between microwave radiation at a frequency of 7.5billion beats per second (7500MHz) and a micro drum vibrating at radio frequencies of about 11million beats per second. Compared to similar experiments, NIST claims the rate of energy exchange in its device - the coupling that reflects the strength of the connection - is much stronger, the mechanical vibrations last longer, and the apparatus is much easier to make. The NIST drum is a round aluminium membrane 100nm thick and 15µm wide, lightweight and flexible enough to vibrate freely, but larger and heavier than the nanowires typically used in similar experiments. "The drum is so much larger than nanowires physically that you can make this coupling strength go through the roof," says first author John Teufel, a NIST research affiliate who designed the drum. "The drum hits a perfect compromise where it's still microscale but you can couple to it strongly." According to Teufel, the experiment is a step toward entanglement, a quantum state linking the properties of objects, between the microwave photons and the drum motion. He believes the apparatus has the high coupling strength and low energy losses needed to generate entanglement. Future experiments will address whether the mechanical drumbeats obey the rules of quantum mechanics, which govern the behaviour of light and atoms. If so, NIST says it would be a key achievement in the effort to develop components for superconducting quantum computers and quantum simulations. The research was described in the March 10 issue of Nature.