We propose to use the resonant enhancement of the parametric instability in an optomechanical system of two optical modes coupled to a mechanical oscillator to prepare mechanical states with sub-Poissonian phonon statistics. Strong single photon coupling is not required. The requirements regarding sideband resolution, circulating cavity power and environmental temperature are in reach with state of the art parameters of optomechanical crystals. Phonon antibunching can be verfied in a Hanburry-Brown-Twiss measurement on the output field of the optomechanical cavity.
Singularities that symbolize abrupt changes and exhibit extraordinary behavior are of broad interest. We experimentally study optomechanically induced singularities in a compound system consisting of a three-dimensional aluminum superconducting cavity and a metalized high-coherence silicon nitride membrane resonator. Mechanically-induced coherent perfect absorption and anti-lasing occur simultaneously under a critical optomechanical coupling strength. Meanwhile, the phase around the cavity resonance undergoes an abrupt $π$-phase transition, which further flips the phase slope in the frequency …
This paper discusses the effect of saturated absorption on the quantum features of a sub-Poissonian laser. It is shown that when both media (laser and absorbing) are saturated, the appearance of an additional element in the cavity does not lead to the demolition of the quantum properties (regular statistics of photons and quadrature squeezing) of laser radiation.
Sub-Poisson field with much reduced fluctuations in a cavity can boost quantum precision measurements via cavity-enhanced light-matter interactions. Strong coupling between an atom and a cavity mode has been utilized to generate highly sub-Poisson fields. However, a macroscopic number of optical intracavity photons with more than 3dB variance reduction in a setting of laser has not been possible. Here, we report sub-Poisson field lasing in a microlaser operating with hundreds of atoms with well-regulated atom-cavity coupling and interaction time. Its photon-number variance was 4dB below the st…
In this work we study an optomechanical system in which there is a purely quadratic optomechanical coupling between the optical and mechanical modes. The optical mode is pumped by three coherent fields and the mechanical mode is parametrically driven. We show that if the frequencies and amplitudes of both optical and mechanical drivings are properly chosen, the optomechanical interaction gives rise to an effective interaction, which, in the presence of optical damping and in the absence of mechanical damping, has the squeezed vacuum state and the squeezed one phonon state as dark states of the…
We propose to pump semiconductor quantum dots with surface acoustic waves which deliver an alternating periodic sequence of electrons and holes. In combination with a good optical cavity such regular pumping could entail anti-bunching and sub-Poissonian photon statistics. In the bad-cavity limit a train of equally spaced photons would arise.
In this paper, we study the full statistics of photons transmitted through an optical cavity coupled to nanomechanical motion. We analyze the entire temporal evolution of the photon correlations, the Fano factor, and the effects of strong laser driving, all of which show pronounced features connected to the mechanical backaction. In the regime of single-photon strong coupling, this allows us to predict a transition from sub-Poissonian to super-Poissonian statistics for larger observation time intervals. Furthermore, we predict cascades of transmitted photons triggered by multi-photon transitio…
Cavity optomechanical phenomena, such as cooling, amplification or optomechanically induced transparency, emerge due to a strong imbalance in the dissipation rates of the parametrically coupled electromagnetic and mechanical resonators. Here we analyze the reversed dissipation regime where the mechanical energy relaxation rate exceeds the energy decay rate of the electromagnetic cavity. We demonstrate that this regime allows for mechanically-induced amplification (or cooling) of the electromagnetic mode. Gain, bandwidth, and added noise of this electromagnetic amplifier are derived and compare…
We propose nonreciprocal phonon lasing in a coupled cavity system composed of an optomechanical and a spinning resonator. We show that the optical Sagnac effect leads to significant modifications in both the mechanical gain and the power threshold for phonon lasing. More importantly, the phonon lasing in this system is unidirectional, that is the phonon lasing takes place when the coupled system is driven in one direction but not the other. Our work establishes the potential of spinning optomechanical devices for low-power mechanical isolation and unidirectional amplification. This provides a …
We propose a novel scheme for realizing single-photon blockade in a weakly driven hybrid cavity optomechanical system consisting of a nonlinear photonic crystal. Sub-Poissonian statistics is realized even when the single-photon optomechanical coupling strength is smaller than the decay rate of the optical mode. The scheme relaxes the requirement of strong coupling for photon blockade in optomechanical systems. It is shown that photon blockade could be generated at the telecommunication wavelength.
We investigate a semiconductor quantum dot as a microscopic analog of a basic optomechanical setup. We show, that optomechanical features can be reproduced by the solid-state platform, arising from parallels of the underlying interaction processes, which in the optomechanical case is the radiation pressure coupling and in the semiconductor case the electron-phonon coupling. In optomechanics, phonons are typically induced via confined photons, acting on a movable mirror, while in the semiconductor system the phonons are emitted by the laser-driven electronic system. There are analogous effects …
The nonlinear component of the optomechanical interaction between light and mechanical vibration promises many exciting classical and quantum mechanical applications, but is generally weak. Here we demonstrate enhancement of nonlinear optomechanical measurement of mechanical motion by using pairs of coupled optical and mechanical modes in a photonic crystal device. In the same device we show linear optomechanical measurement with a strongly reduced input power and reveal how both enhancements are related. Our design exploits anisotropic mechanical elasticity to create strong coupling between m…
Adding excitations on a coherent state provides an effective way to observe nonclassical properties of radiation fields. Here we describe and analyse how to apply this concept to the motional state of a mechanical oscillator and present a full scheme to prepare non-Gaussian {\it phonon}-added coherent states of the mechanical motion in cavity optomechanics. We first generate a mechanical coherent state using electromagnetically induced transparency. We then add a single phonon onto the coherent state via optomechanical parametric down-conversion combined with single photon detection. We valida…
We present an integrated optomechanical and electromechanical nanocavity, in which a common mechanical degree of freedom is coupled to an ultrahigh-Q photonic crystal defect cavity and an electrical circuit. The sys- tem allows for wide-range, fast electrical tuning of the optical nanocavity resonances, and for electrical control of optical radiation pressure back-action effects such as mechanical amplification (phonon lasing), cooling, and stiffening. These sort of integrated devices offer a new means to efficiently interconvert weak microwave and optical signals, and are expected to pave the…
Demonstrating a device that efficiently connects light, motion, and microwaves is an outstanding challenge in classical and quantum photonics. We make significant progress in this direction by demonstrating a photonic crystal resonator on thin-film lithium niobate (LN) that simultaneously supports high-$Q$ optical and mechanical modes, and where the mechanical modes are coupled piezoelectrically to microwaves. For optomechanical coupling, we leverage the photoelastic effect in LN by optimizing the device parameters to realize coupling rates $g_0/2π\approx 120~\textrm{kHz}$. An optomechanical c…
In this work we investigate an optomechanical system consisting of two cavities coupled to the same mechanical resonator. We consider each cavity being weakly pumped as well as a small tunneling rate between the cavities. In such conditions, the system can be studied via quantum Langevin equations and the steady state solution can be found perturbatively. In order to ensure that the approximations and methods used to study the system are suitable, the analytical results were compared to numerical simulations. We study the statistical properties of the cavity radiation fields and we show that d…
Phonon lasers, as the counterpart of photonic lasers, have been intensively studied in a large variety of systems, however, (all) most of them are based on the directly coherent pumping. Intuitively, dissipation is an unfavorable factor for gain in a laser. Here we demonstrate a novel mechanism of phonon lasing from the dissipative coupling in a multimode optomechanical system. By precisely engineering the dissipations of two membranes and tuning the intensity modulation of the cavity light, the two-membrane-in-the-middle system shows anti-parity-time (anti-PT) symmetry and the cavity mediated…
In the well-known stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) process, spontaneous acoustic phonons in materials are stimulated by laser light and scatter the latter into a Stokes sideband. SBS becomes more pronounced in optical fibers and has been harnessed to amplify optical signals and even achieve lasing. Exploitation of SBS has recently surged on integrated photonics platforms as simultaneous confinement of photons and phonons in waveguides leads to drastically enhanced interaction. Instead of being optically stimulated, coherent phonons can also be electromechanically excited with very high ef…
We propose a scheme to significantly increase quadratic optomechanical couplings of optomechanical systems with the help of a nonlinear medium and two driving lasers. The nonlinear medium is driven by one laser and the optical cavity mode is driven by a strong laser. We derive an effective Hamiltonian using squeezing transformation and rotating wave approximation. The effective quadratic optomechanical coupling strength can be larger than the decay rate of the cavity mode by adjusting the two optical driving fields. The thermal noise of squeezed cavity mode can be suppressed totally with the h…
Here we show that quantum states of a mechanical oscillator can be generated in an optomechanical analogue of the micromaser, in absence of any atom-like subsystem, thus exhibiting single-atom masing effects in a system composed solely of oscillator components. In the regime where the single-photon coupling strength is on the order of the cavity decay rate, a cavity mode with at most a single-excitation present gives rise to sub-Poissonian oscillator limit-cycles that generate quantum features in the steady state just above the renormalized cavity resonance frequency and mechanical sidebands. …
A dielectric body couples with electromagnetic fields through radiation pressure and electrostrictive forces, which mediate phonon-photon coupling in cavity optomechanics. In a magnetic medium, according to Korteweg-Helmholtz formula, magnetostrictive forces should arise and lead to phonon-magnon interaction. Here we report such a coupled phonon-magnon system based on ferrimagnetic spheres, which we term as cavity magnomechanics, by analogy to cavity optomechanics. Coherent phonon-magnon interactions, including electromagnetically induced transparency and absorption, are demonstrated. Exciting…
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. …
Intrinsic defects in optomechanical devices are generally viewed to be detrimental for achieving coherent amplification of phonons, and great care has thus been exercised in fabricating devices and materials with no (or a minimal number of) defects. Contrary to this view, here we show that, by surpassing an exceptional point (EP), both the mechanical gain and the phonon number can be enhanced despite increasing defect losses. This counterintuitive effect, well described by an effective non-Hermitian phonon-defect model, provides a mechanical analog of the loss-induced purely optical lasing. Th…
We describe a novel type of blockade in a hybrid mode generated by linear coupling of photonic and phononic modes. We refer to this effect as hybrid photon-phonon blockade and show how it can be generated and detected in a driven nonlinear optomechanical superconducting system. Thus, we study boson-number correlations in the photon, phonon, and hybrid modes in linearly coupled microwave and mechanical resonators with a superconducting qubit inserted in one of them. We find such system parameters for which we observe eight types of different combinations of either blockade or tunnelling effects…
