SCREAM: Synthesizing and Controlling Resonant Electric and Magnetic near fields using piezoelectric micro-resonators

Serge Haroche and Dave Wineland were awarded the 2012 Nobel prize in physics for developing experimental methods for controlling and manipulating individual quantum systems. The groundwork that they laid has led to spectacular progress in the past two decades on the development of increasingly sophisticated methods for achieving exquisite control over single quantum systems. This has coincided with an increasing (academic and commercial) interest worldwide on the development of novel computing, communication and sensing platforms that exploit the surprising effects underlying quantum systems, in particular superposition and entanglement, and have fueled the second quantum revolution.

As our understanding and control of individual quantum systems grows, there is an ever-present need for the development of novel experimental methods that provide greater control and sensitivity in manipulating and reading out individual quantum systems. This project outlines the use of one such platform, based on exploiting the surface electric and magnetic fields in piezoelectric microresonators, for achieving greater sensitivity in the control and readout of nanoscale spin systems. The sensitivity enhancement comes out from confining the fields to deeply subwavelength volumes in high quality factor cavities, an effect that is well known in cavity quantum electrodynamics.

While this proposal is aimed at proving the underlying principles and developing the novel experimental platform, we envision this work will revolutionize the way we control and manipulate spin systems for a wide variety of applications, ranging from performing electron spin resonance on nanoscale biological samples to enabling electrical readout of single spins for spin based quantum information processing.