Engineering phonon-phonon interactions in multimode circuit quantum acousto-dynamics

Abstract: In recent years, remarkable progress has been made towards encoding and processing quantum information in the large Hilbert space of bosonic modes. Mechanical resonators are of great interest for this purpose, since they confine many high quality factor modes into a small volume and can be easily integrated with many different quantum systems. An important yet challenging task is to create direct interactions between different mechanical modes. Here we demonstrate an in-situ tunable beam-splitter-type interaction between several mechanical modes of a high-overtone bulk acoustic wave resonator. The engineered interaction is mediated by a parametrically driven superconducting transmon qubit, and we show that it can be tailored to couple pairs or triplets of phononic modes. Furthermore, we use this interaction to demonstrate the Hong-Ou-Mandel effect between phonons. Our results lay the foundations for using phononic systems as quantum memories and platforms for quantum simulations.