A single-photon emitter coupled to a phononic-crystal resonator in the resolved-sideband regime

    The Paper of the day describes the coupling of a single-photon emitter, specifically a quantum dot, to a phononic-crystal resonator in the resolved-sideband regime. The key achievements are, The phononic-crystal resonator has a high mechanical frequency of 1.466 GHz and a high quality factor of 2.1 x 10^3, allowing it to operate in the resolved-sideband regime. The quantum dot has a narrow optical linewidth, enabling high sensitivity to the mechanical motion. By matching the effective Rabi frequency of the quantum dot to the mechanical frequency, the authors were able to observe the interaction between the quantum dot and the mechanical resonator, even for the thermally-driven mechanical motion at 4.2 K. The authors extracted an exciton-phonon coupling rate of 2.9 MHz, which is an unprecedentedly high value.The work represents a major step towards quantum control of mechanical resonators using single-photon emitters.