Quantum Entanglement Made in Sound, Then Moved Across a Chip

A research team reports in Science that it entangled two, four and six vibrational modes spread across two acoustic resonators on a single chip, and then moved smaller entangled states from one resonator to the other.

The resonators hold quantum states in phonons, the quantum units of vibration in a solid, rather than in light or in the charge moving through a circuit. The authors describe the architecture as hardware-efficient and scalable, and say it opens a path toward large-scale quantum networks built from mechanical parts.

Dian Tan of the International Quantum Academy in Shenzhen and colleagues published the result Oct. 15, 2026, in Science. The paper's last author is Dapeng Yu, affiliated with both the institute and the Shenzhen branch of Hefei National Laboratory. They report fidelities of 0.912 ± 0.003 for the two-mode state, 0.790 ± 0.003 for four modes and 0.570 ± 0.001 for six. Fidelity is how closely the state they made matches the state they aimed at, where 1 would be an exact match.

The figures fall sharply as modes are added. Transferring a state between the two resonators lowers them further: the team reports 0.785 ± 0.006 for a two-mode state and 0.601 ± 0.006 for a four-mode state.

What the paper reports is the preparation and transfer of entangled states, not a quantum computation.

The work comes from the International Quantum Academy and Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, with co-authors at EPFL in Lausanne, Zhejiang University, the University of Stuttgart and Jimei University in Xiamen. Data behind the paper's figures is deposited in the Zenodo repository, and the work credits funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and a Guangdong province research program.