Efficient and continuous microwave photoconversion in hybrid cavity-semiconductor nanowire double quantum dot diodes

Waqar Khan,Ville F Maisi,Kimberly A Dick,Sebastian Lehmann,Patrick P Potts,Peter Samuelsson,Claes Thelander

doi:10.1038/s41467-021-25446-1

Abstract

Converting incoming photons to electrical current is the key operation principle of optical photodetectors and it enables a host of emerging quantum information technologies. The leading approach for continuous and efficient detection in the optical domain builds on semiconductor photodiodes. However, there is a paucity of efficient and continuous photon detectors in the microwave regime, because photon energies are four to five orders of magnitude lower therein and conventional photodiodes do not have that sensitivity. Here we tackle this gap and demonstrate how microwave photons can be efficiently and continuously converted to electrical current in a high-quality, semiconducting nanowire double quantum dot resonantly coupled to a cavity. In particular, in our photodiode device, an absorbed photon gives rise to a single electron tunneling through the double dot, with a conversion efficiency reaching 6%.

Highlights

Converting incoming photons to electrical current is the key operation principle of optical photodetectors and it enables a host of emerging quantum information technologies
The double quantum dot (DQD) forms an effective electronic two-level system with a tunable energy gap between the ground and excited states acting as an effective bandgap[12,21,22,23], which is analogous to optical pn-junction-based detectors
Concurrence between the photocurrent and resonator response lineshapes provides direct evidence that the photodetector signal arises when photons entering the resonator are absorbed by the DQD, giving rise to an electrical current

Summary

Introduction

Converting incoming photons to electrical current is the key operation principle of optical photodetectors and it enables a host of emerging quantum information technologies. There is a paucity of efficient and continuous photon detectors in the microwave regime, because photon energies are four to five orders of magnitude lower therein and conventional photodiodes do not have that sensitivity We tackle this gap and demonstrate how microwave photons can be efficiently and continuously converted to electrical current in a high-quality, semiconducting nanowire double quantum dot resonantly coupled to a cavity. Major developments in the field that show promise to achieve the desired characteristics for such devices and uses include the demonstration of near-unity photon-to-electron conversion efficiency[6] and high operation speed[7,8] These developments have occurred in the optical domain and corresponding developments in the microwave regime are so far largely lacking. The continuous nature of the demonstrated conversion process, similar to the optical photodiodes[1,2,3], opens up prospects to probe photons and their statistics beyond the gated-time regime[9,10,15,16,17,18]

Methods

Results

Conclusion