Physicists at Universität Regensburg have coupled the vibrations of a macromolecule—a carbon nanotube—to a microwave cavity, creating a novel and highly miniaturized optomechanical system. The team of Dr. Andreas K. Hüttel achieved this by using the quantization of the electrical charge, i.e., that it is carried by single electrons, as a strong amplifier mechanism. Their findings were published on April 2 in Nature Communications. They present an important step towards combining completely different quantum technologies, as, e.g., electron spin qubits and superconducting qubits, in one device.
Source:
https://phys.org/news/2020-04-nanomechanical-quantum-switchboard.html