A fully integrated nanosecond burst RF generator for quantum technologies

Abstract

AbstractQuantum technologies is an emerging field of physics and engineering based on exploiting properties of quantum mechanics such as entanglement, superposition, or tunneling, and which is expected to impact many applications, such as communications, simulation, computation, or sensing and metrology. The operation of quantum technologies is based on the manipulation of the quantum states of certain devices, either to induce transitions between states or to detect the transitions. Irrespective of the practical realization of these quantum devices, their manipulation requires interacting with their quantum resonant states, for which very narrow radio‐frequency (RF) bursts in the range of the GHz are required. Arbitrary waveform generators are used to generate these signals for test purposes, but this is not suitable for practical quantum technology applications, which will need to produce the required bursts by specific circuit building blocks with low power and small dimensions. Here, an integrated RF burst generator capable of producing GHz bursts shorter than 1 ns is presented. The proposed architecture is tested using a 5 GHz quadrature LC‐tank voltage‐controlled oscillator (LC‐VCO), showing that the four equally spaced phases can be switched every 500 ps, which allows the generation of more complex RF bursts for optimized quantum state manipulation.