Low loss Bulk Acoustic Wave devices are considered from the point of view of the solid state approach as phonon-confining cavities. We demonstrate effective design of such acoustic cavities with phonon-trapping techniques exhibiting extremely high quality factors for trapped longitudinally-polarized phonons of various wavelengths. Quality factors of observed modes exceed 1 billion, with a maximum Q-factor of 8 billion and Q × f product of 1.6 · 1018 at liquid helium temperatures. Such high sensitivities allow analysis of intrinsic material losses in resonant phonon systems. Various mechanisms of phonon losses are discussed and estimated.

Low-loss, high frequency acoustic resonators cooled to millikelvin temperatures are a topic of great interest for application to hybrid quantum systems. When cooled to 20 mK, we show that resonant acoustic phonon modes in a Bulk Acoustic Wave (BAW) quartz resonator demonstrate exceptionally low loss (with Q-factors of order billions) at frequencies of 15.6 and 65.4 MHz, with a maximum f.Q product of 7.8×10 16 Hz. Given this result, we show that the Q-factor in such devices near the quantum ground state can be four orders of magnitude better than previously attained. Such resonators possess the low losses crucial for electromagnetic cooling to the phonon ground state, and the possibility of long coherence and interaction times of a few seconds, allowing multiple quantum gate operations.

International audienceMeasurement of the mechanical losses of quartz crystal is a topic of interest for communities dealing with the gravitational wave detectors and also the time and frequency domain. About the latter, the authors describe Q-factor measurements of quartz crystal resonators at cryogenic temperatures under 10 K, thanks to a cryocooler-based experimental set-up. A Q-factor of 325 millions at 4 K, on the fifth overtone of the quasilongitudinal mode at 15.9 MHz, has been recorded. As shown, the acoustic wave trapping is suspected to limit the Landau-Rumer regime below 6 K [Landau and Rumer, Phys. Z. Sowjetunion 11, 18 (1937)]