Kinnective Inductive Electro-Mechanical Coupling (KIMEC)

The purpose of this research is to understand and explore a new type of light-matter coupling in quantum condensed matter which is dual to the standard electrostatic coupling commonly used in the field of quantum electro-mechanics.

Kinetic Inductive Mechano-Electric Coupling (KIMEC) uses mechanical strain to modulate the density of Cooper pairs in a superconducting condensate and thereby its kinetic inductance.

We detect the change in inductance as a shift in the resonant frequency of a microwave plasma mode with high quality factor.

We aim to increase the strength of KIMEC through electrical and mechanical design and use KIMEC to detect mechanical motion and sense force in scanning probe microscopy.

The nonlinear current dependence of the kinetic inductance will be used to integrate parametric amplification into sensor design.

KIMEC changes the reactive response of the superconducting condensate, and we want to explore this change when the characteristic impedance of the plasma mode is close to the quantum resistance RQ = h/4e2, when the condensed matter system is poised at the edge of a quantum phase transition.

We also want to explore the use of KIMEC for mechanically pumped parametric mode coupling for signal amplification and for generating large scale entanglement of modes in a microwave frequency comb.

To our knowledge, KIMEC was not previously explored in the published literature, particularly in the context of quantum sensing.