Coherent transduction and dynamical back-action between light and millimeter waves
Abstract
Electro-optic transduction can bypass the loss and noise of electronic frequency conversion at millimeter-wave frequencies by parametrically converting signals onto low-loss, low-noise optical carriers, with coupling rates that grow with frequency. Exploiting this growth, however, requires shrinking both the millimeter-wave and optical resonators while preserving their quality factors and spatial overlap, which has not yet been achieved. Here, we demonstrate a triply resonant transducer whose optical and millimeter-wave resonators have comparable dimensions and minimal mode volumes. Coupled lithium niobate Fabry-Pérot cavities, with free spectral ranges above 650 GHz and quality factors up to 106, form a photonic molecule integrated with a quarter-wave gold resonator at 263 GHz. The device reaches a vacuum electro-optic coupling rate g0/2π≈ 60 kHz, six times larger than previous millimeter-wave transducers and sixty times larger than at microwave frequencies. The device optically detects room-temperature thermal millimeter-wave photons at effective occupancies below one, which also serve as a calibration tone for transduction efficiency. Coherent transduction reaches cooperativities approaching 0.3, corresponding to internal efficiencies around 67%, accompanied by electro-optic dynamical back-action that broadens or narrows the optical resonances. These results demonstrate the advantage and feasibility of the frequency scaling of electro-optic coupling, establishing an architecture for weak-signal sensing and quantum and classical networking.
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BibTeX
@misc{primo2026coherent,
title = {{Coherent transduction and dynamical back-action between light and millimeter waves}},
author = {André Garcia Primo and Jiawen Liu and Amit Vankayala and Gabriel Jülg and Aleksei Gaier and Yazan Lampert and Ileana-Cristina Benea-Chelmus},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2611.00279},
eprint = {2611.00279},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.00279},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Coherent transduction and dynamical back-action between light and millimeter waves
AU - André Garcia Primo
AU - Jiawen Liu
AU - Amit Vankayala
AU - Gabriel Jülg
AU - Aleksei Gaier
AU - Yazan Lampert
AU - Ileana-Cristina Benea-Chelmus
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/01
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2611.00279
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.00279
AB - Electro-optic transduction can bypass the loss and noise of electronic frequency conversion at millimeter-wave frequencies by parametrically converting signals onto low-loss, low-noise optical carriers, with coupling rates that grow with frequency. Exploiting this growth, however, requires shrinking both the millimeter-wave and optical resonators while preserving their quality factors and spatial overlap, which has not yet been achieved. Here, we demonstrate a triply resonant transducer whose optical and millimeter-wave resonators have comparable dimensions and minimal mode volumes. Coupled lithium niobate Fabry-Pérot cavities, with free spectral ranges above 650 GHz and quality factors up to 10^6, form a photonic molecule integrated with a quarter-wave gold resonator at 263 GHz. The device reaches a vacuum electro-optic coupling rate g_0/2π≈ 60 kHz, six times larger than previous millimeter-wave transducers and sixty times larger than at microwave frequencies. The device optically detects room-temperature thermal millimeter-wave photons at effective occupancies below one, which also serve as a calibration tone for transduction efficiency. Coherent transduction reaches cooperativities approaching 0.3, corresponding to internal efficiencies around 67%, accompanied by electro-optic dynamical back-action that broadens or narrows the optical resonances. These results demonstrate the advantage and feasibility of the frequency scaling of electro-optic coupling, establishing an architecture for weak-signal sensing and quantum and classical networking.
ER -