Sarah Benchabane winner of an ERC Consolidator grant 2019

CNRS Research Fellow at the FEMTO-ST Institute, Sarah is awarded with a prestigious €2M European Research Council (ERC) grant for her project : Nanophonics for Quantum Information Processing.

The European Research Council (ERC) announced on Tuesday 10 December the 301 winners of its 2019 "Consolidator Grant ", which will receive a total of €600 million.

France ranks third among the recipients with 43 projects awarded this year, compared to 32 in 2018, behind Germany (52) and the United Kingdom (50).

As a reminder, since 2007 - the date of creation of the European Research Council - the FEMTO-ST Institute now has 4 ERC scholarship winners: Yanne K CHEMBO (starting grant 2011: €1.4M), John DUDLEY (advanced grant 2011: €1.8M), François COURVOISIER (consolidator grant 2015: €2M) and Sarah BENCHABANE (consolidated grant 2019: €2M).

Nanophonics for Quantum Information Processing Project

Over the past thirty years, the remarkable technological advances in microfabrication processes have thrust mechanical vibrations into the quantum realm. The intrinsic coherence of mechanical motion and the capability to couple it to other physical degrees of freedom hold promises of scalable hybrid quantum platforms. But mechanical vibrations are also powerful conveyors of physical information. They are ubiquitously used in wireless communication systems, where bulk and surface acoustic wave (BAW and SAW) devices are prevalent. Their high achievable quality factors and frequencies, as well as their low propagation speed, are appropriate ingredients for information processing: they are synonymous of storage and delay. Recent works have shown that SAW could be operated in the single-phonon regime, potentially behaving as a quantum bus between solid-state qubits. The proposed approaches, however, do not yet take advantage of wave propagation management at the substrate surface itself.

The uNIQUE project aims at the development of an all-electro-acousto-mechanical quantum information platform exploiting the full potential offered by surface acoustic waves in the single-phonon regime, and by mechanical resonators beyond the standard quantum limit. It adopts a yet unexplored approach at the crossing of phononics, nanomechanics and quantum acoustics to yield a fully coherent mechanical playground that can be used at the interface with other solid-state or photon qubits or as an independent quantum signal processing system. It will exploit the substrate surface to prepare and transfer nonclassical states of motion of surface-coupled phononic resonators with the utmost ambition to encode the state information in a travelling single-phonon, allowing remote entanglement. This platform will allow manipulating quantum states in exceedingly compact systems driven by a sheer radio-frequency signal.

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