Magnon-assisted photon-phonon conversion in the presence of structured environments

Abstract

Quantum conversion or interface is one of the most prominent protocols in quantum information processing and quantum state engineering. We propose a photon-phonon conversion protocol in a hybrid magnomechanical system comprising a microwave optical mode, a driven magnon mode and a mechanical-vibrating mode. The microwave photons in the optical cavity are coupled to the magnons by the magnetic-dipole interaction, and the latter are coupled to the mechanical phonons by the magnetostrictive interaction. With strong photon-magnon interaction and strong driving on magnon, an effective Hamiltonian is constructed to describe the conversion between photons and phonons nearby their resonant point. The cavity-magnon system can then play the role of a quantum memory. Moreover, the faithfulness of the photon-phonon conversion is estimated in terms of fidelities for state evolution and state-independent transfer. The former is discussed in the Lindblad master equation taking account the leakages of photon, phonon and magnon into consideration. The latter is derived by the Heisenberg-Langevin equation considering the non-Markovian noise from the structured environments for both optical and mechanical modes. The state-evolution fidelity is found to be robust to the weak leakage. The transfer fidelity can be maintained by the Ohmic and sub-Ohmic environments of the photons and is insensitive to the $1/f$ noise of the phonons. Our work thus provides an interesting application for the magnon system as a photon-phonon converter in the microwave regime.