Original title: Telecom-Integrated Photonic Memory Operating Near the Mechanical Ground State
Jindao Tang, Bo Jing, Liping Zeng, Peiqin Chen +10 · September 2026
Future quantum networks need memories that fit on chips, work with telecom light, and read out data on demand. Tiny, engineered mechanical vibrating devices can fill this role because they store information as long-lived sound vibrations, called phonons. Researchers built an on-chip memory that catches telecom-band photons and turns them into mechanical vibrations using a technique called optomechanically induced transparency. Later, the device can retrieve those photons whenever needed, even down at the few-photon level. To keep heat from scrambling the stored information, the team cooled the setup inside a dilution refrigeratorA device that cools things to extremely low temperatures, near absolute zero. at 20 mK and tailored their control light. As a result, the device reached a very low phonon occupancyThe average number of vibrational quanta (phonons) in the resonator; lower means less noise. of just 0.32 while storing photons.
Imagine trying to write a message on a chalkboard while someone keeps shaking the board. The shaking smears the writing. Now imagine you can stop the shaking almost completely, so the message stays clear. In this paper, the mechanical resonator is like the chalkboard, and the random vibrations are the shaking. By cooling the chip to near absolute zero, they reduce the shaking so much that the stored light (the message) remains undisturbed.
Quantum networks need memory chips that can store and retrieve photons on demand. This work shows a tiny mechanical resonator on a chip can do that for telecom-band photons, the kind used in fiber optics, with almost no background noise. That brings practical quantum repeaters and secure quantum communication closer to reality.
The abstract notes operation at the few-photon level, not single-photon, and the phonon occupancy of 0.32 is low but not exactly zero. The device is demonstrated in a laboratory dilution refrigerator, not in a network setting. Scalability to multiple memories and integration with other quantum components is not shown. The work lays groundwork but does not yet demonstrate a complete quantum network node.
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Telecom-Integrated Photonic Memory Operating Near the Mechanical Ground State — Jindao Tang, Bo Jing, Liping Zeng et al.
Abstract licence: CC0
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.