Creation and control of multi-phonon Fock states in a bulk acoustic-wave resonator

Quantum states of mechanical motion can be important resources for quantum information, metrology and studies of fundamental physics. Recent demonstrations of superconducting qubits coupled to acoustic resonators have opened up the possibility of performing quantum operations on macroscale motional modes(1-3), which can act as long-lived quantum memories or transducers. In addition, they can potentially be used to test decoherence mechanisms in macroscale objects and other modifications to standard quantum theory(4,5). Many of these applications call for the ability to create and characterize complex quantum states, such as states with a well defined phonon number, also known as phonon Fock states. Such capabilities require fast quantum operations and long coherence times of the mechanical mode. Here we demonstrate the controlled generation of multi-phonon Fock states in a macroscale bulk acoustic-wave resonator. We also perform Wigner tomography and state reconstruction to highlight the quantum nature of the prepared states(6). These demonstrations are made possible by the long coherence times of our acoustic resonator and our ability to selectively couple a superconducting qubit to individual phonon modes. Our work shows that circuit quantum acoustodynamics(7) enables sophisticated quantum control of macroscale mechanical objects and opens up the possibility of using acoustic modes as quantum resources.