Thin film aluminum nitride surface acoustic wave resonators for quantum acoustodynamics

Abstract

Quantum excitations of macroscopic surface acoustic waves (SAWs) have been tailored to control, communicate, and transduce stationary and flying quantum states. However, the limited lifetime of these hybrid quantum systems remains critical obstacles to extend their applications in quantum information processing. Here, we present potentials of thin film aluminum nitride to on-chip integrated phonons with superconducting qubits over previous bulk piezoelectric substrates. We have reported high-quality thin film GHz-SAW resonators with the highest internal quality factor Qi of 4.92×104 in the quantum regime. The internal losses of SAW resonators are systematically investigated by tuning the parameters of sample layout, power, and temperature. Our results manifest that SAWs on piezoelectric films are readily integrated with standard fabrication of Josephson junction quantum circuits and offer excellent acoustic platforms for high-coherence quantum acoustodynamics architectures.