I discuss the robustness of the pumped cavity dynamics against phase diffusion of the laser and conclude that opto-mechanical cooling has extreme sensitivity compared to laser cooling of atoms. Certain proposals of ground state opto-mechanical cooling by single cavity would require an unrealistic sharp laser linewidth or equivalently, a very low level of phase noise. A systematic way to cancel classical excess phase noise is the interferometric twin-cavity pumping, initiated for optically trapped macro-mirrors of future gravitational-wave detectors.
We study enhanced sensing of optomechanically induced nonlinearity (OMIN) in a cavity-waveguide coupled system. The Hamiltonian of the system is anti-PT symmetric with the two involved cavities being dissipatively coupled via the waveguide. When a weak waveguide-mediated coherent coupling is introduced, the anti-PT symmetry may break down. However, we find a strong bistable response of the cavity intensity to the OMIN near the cavity resonance, benefiting from linewidth suppression caused by the vacuum induced coherence. The joint effect of optical bistability and the linewidth suppression is …
Cavities with extremely narrow linewidth of 10-100 Hz are required for realizing frequency dependent squeezing to enable gravitational wave detectors to surpass the free mass standard quantum limit over a broad frequency range. Hundred-meter-scale high finesse cavities have been proposed for this purpose. Optomechanically induced transparency (OMIT) enables the creation of optomechanical cavities in which the linewidth limit is set by the extremely narrow linewidth of a high Q factor mechanical resonator. Using an 85mm OMIT cavity with a silicon nitride membrane, we demonstrate a tunable linew…
We investigate theoretically the influence of laser phase noise on the cooling and heating of a generic cavity optomechanical system. We derive the back-action damping and heating rates and the mechanical frequency shift of the radiation pressure-driven oscillating mirror, and derive the minimum phonon occupation number for small laser linewidths. We find that in practice laser phase noise does not pose serious limitations to ground state cooling. We then consider the effects of laser phase noise in a parametric cavity driving scheme that minimizes the back-action heating of one of the quadrat…
Nonreciprocal elements, such as isolators and circulators, play an important role in classical and quantum information processing. Recently, strong nonreciprocal effects have been experimentally demonstrated in cavity optomechanical systems. In these approaches, the bandwidth of the nonreciprocal photon transmission is limited by the mechanical resonator linewidth, which is arguably much smaller than the linewidths of the cavity modes in most electromechanical or optomechanical devices. In this work, we demonstrate broadband nonreciprocal photon transmission in the \emph{reversed-dissipation} …
An optical field inside a Fabry-Perot cavity would exhibit multistability either when an atomic medium, acting as a classical dielectric, is filled into the cavity or when the cavity becomes optomechanical where one reflecting end becomes movable. An external laser is essential in both cases to drive the cavity mode out of the zero equilibrium state. We study the equilibrium states of an atom-filled optomechanical cavity, where the atoms are considered a collective two-level systems as well as an active component that replaces the role of the driving laser. Multistability is found when the ato…
A major goal within the field of optomechanics is to achieve the single-photon strong coupling regime, wherein even a mechanical displacement as small as the zero-point uncertainty is enough to shift an optical cavity resonance by more than its linewidth. This goal is difficult, however, due to the small zero-point motion of conventional mechanical systems. Here, we show that an atom trapped in and coupled to a cavity constitutes an attractive platform for realizing this regime. In particular, while many experiments focus on achieving strong coupling between a photon and the atomic internal de…
We propose that the optomechanical systems can be potential platforms to implement the Fröhlich condensate of phonons. We consider a one-dimensional array of membranes coupled to the cavity field via a quadratic interaction, and the cavity is pumped by an external laser. Analytical and numerical results predict that the high phonon occupancy of the lowest or highest mechanical mode is achievable depending on the detuning of the driving laser, the optomechnical strength, and the temperature. The decoherence of the Fröhlich condensate can be largely suppressed by the large number of membranes. O…
Cavity optoelectromechanical regenerative amplification is demonstrated. An optical cavity enhances mechanical transduction, allowing sensitive measurement even for heavy oscillators. A 27.3 MHz mechanical mode of a microtoroid was linewidth narrowed to 6.6\pm1.4 mHz, 30 times smaller than previously achieved with radiation pressure driving in such a system. These results may have applications in areas such as ultrasensitive optomechanical mass spectroscopy.
We study a multimode optomechanical system where two mechanical oscillators are coupled to an electromagnetic cavity. Previously it has been shown that if the mechanical resonances have nearly equal frequencies, one can make the oscillators to interact via the cavity by strong pumping with a coherent pump tone. One can view the interaction also as emergence of an electromagnetically dark mode which gets asymptotically decoupled from the cavity and has a linewidth much smaller than that of the bare cavity. The narrow linewidth and long lifetime of the dark mode could be advantageous for example…
We identify signatures of the intrinsic nonlinear interaction between light and mechanical motion in cavity optomechanical systems. These signatures are observable even when the cavity linewidth exceeds the optomechanical coupling rate. A strong laser drive red-detuned by twice the mechanical frequency from the cavity resonance frequency makes two-phonon processes resonant, which leads to a nonlinear version of optomechanically induced transparency. This effect provides a new method of measuring the average phonon number of the mechanical oscillator. Furthermore, we show that if the strong las…
We present a scheme for cooling mechanical motion to the ground state in an optomechanical system. Unlike standard sideband cooling, this scheme applies to the so-called unresolved sideband regime, where the resonance frequency of the mechanical mode is much smaller than the cavity linewidth. Ground state cooling becomes possible when assuming the presence of an additional, auxiliary mechanical mode and exploiting the effect of optomechanically induced transparency. We first consider a system where one optical cavity interacts with two mechanical modes, and show that ground state cooling of th…
We present a detailed theoretical discussion of the effects of ubiquitous laser noise on cooling and the coherent dynamics in opto-mechanical systems. Phase fluctuations of the driving laser induce modulations of the linearized opto-mechanical coupling as well as a fluctuating force on the mirror due to variations of the mean cavity intensity. We first evaluate the influence of both effects on cavity cooling and find that for a small laser linewidth the dominant heating mechanism arises from intensity fluctuations. The resulting limit on the final occupation number scales linearly with the cav…
The strong light-matter optomechanical coupling offered by Coherent Scattering (CS) set-ups have allowed the experimental realisation of quantum ground state cavity cooling of the axial motion of a levitated nanoparticle [U. Delić et al., Science 367, 892 (2020)]. An appealing milestone is now quantum 2D cooling of the full in-plane motion, in any direction in the transverse plane. By a simple adjustment of the trap polarisation, one obtains two nearly equivalent modes, with similar frequencies $ω_{x}\simω_{y}$ and optomechanical couplings $g_{x}\simeq g_{y}$ -- in this experimental configurat…
In this paper, we theoretically propose and investigate a feasible experimental scheme for realizing the dynamical Casimir effect (DCE) of phonons in an optomechanical setup formed by a ground-state precooled mechanical oscillator (MO) inside a Fabry-P{é}rot cavity, which is driven by an amplitude-modulated classical laser field in the dispersive (far-detuned) regime. The time modulation of the driving field leads to the parametric amplification of the mechanical vacuum fluctuations of the MO, which results in the generation of Casimir phonons over time scales longer than the cavity lifetime. …
In this paper we study cavity optomechanical systems in which the position of a mechanical oscillator modulates both the resonance frequency (dispersive coupling) and the linewidth (dissipative coupling) of a cavity mode. Using a quantum noise approach we calculate the optical damping and the optically-induced frequency shift. We find that dissipatively coupled systems feature two parameter regions providing amplification and two parameter regions providing cooling. To investigate the strong-coupling regime, we solve the linearized equations of motion exactly and calculate the mechanical and o…
Direct laser-written optomechanical double membranes in an optical microcavity
University of Bonn（波恩大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Munich Center for Quantum Science and Technology (MCQST)（慕尼黑量子科学与技术中心）；Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）
Directional amplifiers are an important resource in quantum information processing, as they protect sensitive quantum systems from excess noise. Here, we propose an implementation of phase-preserving and phase-sensitive directional amplifiers for microwave signals in an electromechanical setup comprising two microwave cavities and two mechanical resonators. We show that both can reach their respective quantum limits on added noise. In the reverse direction, they emit thermal noise stemming from the mechanical resonators and we discuss how this noise can be suppressed, a crucial aspect for tech…
Coupling electromagnetic waves in a cavity and mechanical vibrations via the radiation pressure of the photons [1,2] is a promising platform for investigations of quantum mechanical properties of motion of macroscopic bodies and thereby the limits of quantum mechanics [3,4]. A drawback is that the effect of one photon tends to be tiny, and hence one of the pressing challenges is to substantially increase the interaction strength towards the scale of the cavity damping rate. A novel scenario is to introduce into the setup a quantum two-level system (qubit), which, besides strengthening the coup…
Noise-Limited Sensitivity in Cavity Optomechanical Molecular Sensing Enabled by Quantum Zero-Point Displacement Coupling and Strong Photon-Phonon Interaction for Chiral Detection
Thermal frequency fluctuations in optical cavities limit the sensitivity of precision experiments ranging from gravitational wave observatories to optical atomic clocks. Conventional modeling of these noises assumes a linear response of the optical field to the fluctuations of cavity frequency. Fundamentally, however, this response is nonlinear. Here we show that nonlinearly transduced thermal fluctuations of cavity frequency can dominate the broadband noise in photodetection, even when the magnitude of fluctuations is much smaller than the cavity linewidth. We term this noise "thermal intermo…
The radiation pressure of light can act to damp and cool the vibrational motion of a mechanical resonator. In understanding the quantum limits of this cooling, one must consider the effect of shot noise fluctuations on the final thermal occupation. In optomechanical sideband cooling in a cavity, the finite Stokes Raman scattering defined by the cavity linewidth combined with shot noise fluctuations dictates a quantum backaction limit, analogous to the Doppler limit of atomic laser cooling. In our work we sideband cool to the quantum backaction limit by using a micromechanical membrane precoole…
