Optomechanical thermometry is a precise and reference-free method to measure absolute temperature. While pumping high optical power is needed to overcome noise and reduce the integration time, there is actually an upper limit to the useful optical power regardless of all other nonideal effects. Side-band inequivalence is a nonlinear effect obtained by higher-order operator algebra in quantum optomechanics and equivalent experiments, which causes asymmetric frequency shifts in side-bands and also an additional difference in their population. This chapter discusses previously unnoticed nonlinear effects arising from side-band inequivalence in optomechanical and Raman thermometry, which determines an upper bound in available optical power for temperature readout.
Optomechanical systems are promising platforms for controlled light-matter interactions. They are capable of providing several fundamental and practical novel features when the mechanical oscillator is cooled down to nearly reach its ground state. In this framework, measuring the effective temperature of the oscillator is perhaps the most relevant step in the characterization of those systems. In conventional schemes, the cavity is driven strongly, and the overall system is well-described by a linear (Gaussian preserving) Hamiltonian. Here, we depart from this regime by considering an undriven…
We review and study the roles of quantum and classical fluctuations in recent cavity-optomechanical experiments which have now reached the quantum regime (mechanical phonon occupancy < 1) using resolved sideband laser cooling. In particular, both the laser noise heating of the mechanical resonator and the form of the optically transduced mechanical spectra, modified by quantum and classical laser noise squashing, are derived under various measurement conditions. Using this theory, we analyze our recent ground-state laser cooling and motional sideband asymmetry experiments with nanoscale optome…
The temperature dependence of the asymmetry between Stokes and anti-Stokes Raman scattering can be exploited for self-calibrating, optically-based thermometry. In the context of cavity optomechanics, we observe the cavity-enhanced scattering of light interacting with the standing-wave drumhead modes of a silicon nitride membrane mechanical resonator. The ratio of the amplitude of Stokes to anti-Stokes scattered light is used to measure temperatures of optically-cooled mechanical modes down to the level of a few vibrational quanta. We demonstrate that the Raman-ratio technique is able to measur…
We present measurements of silica optomechanical resonators, known as bottle resonators, passively cooled in a cryogenic environment. These devices possess a suite of properties that make them advantageous for preparation and measurement in the mechanical ground state, including high mechanical frequency, high optical and mechanical quality factors, and optomechanical sideband resolution. Performing thermometry of the mechanical motion, we find that the optical and mechanical modes demonstrate quantitatively similar laser-induced heating, limiting the lowest average phonon occupation observed …
Strong quantum nonlinearity gives rise to many interesting quantum effects and has wide applications in quantum physics. Herewe investigate the quantum nonlinear effect of an optomechanical system (OMS) consisting of both linear and quadratic coupling. Interestingly, a controllable optomechanical nonlinearity is obtained by applying a driving laser into the cavity. This controllable optomechanical nonlinearity can be enhanced into a strong coupling regime, even if the system is initially in the weak-coupling regime. Moreover, the system dissipation can be suppressed effectively, which allows t…
Open-system dynamics play a key role in the experimental and theoretical study of cavity optomechanical systems. In many cases, the quantum Langevin equations have enabled excellent models for optical decoherence, yet a master-equation approach to the fully nonlinear optomechanical Hamiltonian has thus far proven more elusive. To address this outstanding question and broaden the mathematical tool set available, we derive a solution to the Lindblad master equation that models optical decoherence for a system evolving with the nonlinear optomechanical Hamiltonian. The method combines a Lie-algeb…
Nanomechanical systems are generally embedded in a macroscopic environment where the sources of thermal noise are difficult to pinpoint. We engineer a silicon nitride membrane optomechanical resonator such that its thermal noise is acoustically driven by a spatially well-defined remote macroscopic bath. This bath acts as an acoustic blackbody emitting and absorbing acoustic radiation through the silicon substrate. Our optomechanical system acts as a sensitive detector for the blackbody temperature and for photoacoustic imaging. We demonstrate that the nanomechanical mode temperature is governe…
This thesis focuses on the mathematical description and application of nonlinear cavity optomechanical systems. The first part is concerned with solving the dynamics of the standard nonlinear optomechanical Hamiltonian with an additional time-dependent mechanical displacement and single-mode squeezing term. The solution is based on identifying a Lie algebra that generates the time-evolution of the system, which reduces the problem to considering a finite set of coupled ordinary differential equations of real functions. The second part applies the solutions of the extended optomechanical Hamilt…
We investigate the resonant enhancement of nonlinear interactions in a three-mode cavity optomechanical system with two mechanical oscillators. By using the Keldysh Green's function technique we find that nonlinear effects on the cavity density of states can be greatly enhanced by the resonant scattering of two phononic polaritons, due to their small effective dissipation. In the large detuning limit and taking into account an upper bound on the achievable dressed coupling, the optimal point for probing the nonlinear effect is obtained, showing that such three-mode system can exhibit prominent…
Few-photon optomechanical effects are not only important physical evidences for understanding the radiation-pressure interaction between photons and mechanical oscillation, but also have wide potential applications in modern quantum technology. Here we study the few-photon optomechanical effects including photon blockade and generation of the Schrödinger cat states under the assistance of a cross-Kerr interaction, which is an inherent interaction accompanied the optomechanical coupling in a generalized optomechanical system. By exactly diagonalizing the generalized optomechanical Hamiltonian a…
It is well-known that some nonlinear phenomena such as strong photon blockade are hard to be observed in optomechanical system with current experimental technology. Here, we present a coherent feedback control strategy in which a linear cavity is coherently controlled by an optomechanical controller in a feedback manner. The coherent feedback loop transfers and enhances quantum nonlinearity from the controller to the controlled cavity, which makes it possible to observe strong nonlinear effects in either linear cavity or optomechanical cavity. More interestingly, we find that the strong photon…
Using the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, we derive an effective Hamiltonian for an optomechanical system that leads to a nonlinear Kerr effect in the system's vacuum. The oscillating mirror at one edge of the optomechanical system induces a squeezing effect in the intensity spectrum of the cavity field. A near-resonant laser field is applied at the other edge to drive the cavity field, in order to enhance the Kerr effect. We also propose a quantum-nondemolition-measurement setup to monitor a system with two cavities separated by a common oscillating mirror, based on our effective Hamiltonian …
The interaction of a single-mode field with both a weak Kerr medium and a parametric nonlinearity in an intrinsically nonlinear optomechanical system is studied. The nonlinearities due to the optomechanical coupling and Kerr-down conversion lead to the bistability and tristability in the mean intracavity photon number. Also, our work demonstrates that the lower bound of the resolved sideband regime and the minimum attainable phonon number can be less than that of a bare cavity by controlling the parametric nonlinearity and the phase of the driving field. Moreover, we find that in the system un…
We study the fundamental bounds on precision measurements of parameters contained in a time-dependent nonlinear optomechanical Hamiltonian, which includes the nonlinear light-matter coupling, a mechanical displacement term, and a single-mode mechanical squeezing term. By using a recently developed method to solve the dynamics of this system, we derive a general expression for the quantum Fisher information and demonstrate its applicability through three concrete examples: estimation of the strength of a nonlinear light-matter coupling, the strength of a time-modulated mechanical displacement, …
We study theoretically nonlinear effects arising from the presence of a Kerr-down conversion nonlinear crystal inside an optomechanical cavity. For this system we investigate the influences of the two nonlinearities, i.e., the Kerr nonlinearity and the parametric gain, on the dynamics of the oscillating mirror, the intensity and the squeezing spectra of the transmitted field, and the steady-state mirror-field entanglement. We show that in comparison with a bare optomechanical cavity, the combination of the cavity energy shift due to the Kerr nonlinearity and increase in the intracavity photon …
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…
Cavity optomechanical system involving an optical parametric amplifier (OPA) can exhibit rich classical and quantum dynamical behaviors. By simply modulating the frequency of the laser pumping the OPA, we find two interesting parameter regimes, with one of them enabling to study quantum-classical correspondence in system dynamics, while there exist no classical counterparts of the quantum features for the other. For the former regime, as the parametric gain of OPA increases to a critical value, the classical dynamics of the optical or mechanical modes can experience a transition from the regul…
Quantum control of phonons has being become a focus of attention for developing quantum technologies. Here, we propose a proposal to realize phonon blockade in a quadratically coupled optomechanical system, where a strong nonlinear interaction between photons and phonons can be induced by an external field coherently driving the cavity, and the effective coupling strength is tunable by adjusting the amplitude of the driving field. This optically induced nonlinearity is different from standard methods for realization of phonon blockade, where the nonlinearity is achieved by coupling the mechani…
Optomechanical systems, due to its inherent nonlinear optomechanical coupling, owns rich nonlinear dynamics of different types of motion. The interesting question is that whether there exist some common quantum features to infer the nonlinear dynamical transitions from one type to another. In this paper, we have studied the quantum signatures of transitions from stable fixed points to limit cycles in an optomechanical phonon laser system. Our calculations show that the entanglement of stable fixed points in the long run does not change with time, however, it will oscillate periodically with ti…
By shining laser light through a nanomechanical beam, we measure the beam's thermally driven vibrations and perturb its motion with optical forces at a level dictated by the Heisenberg measurement-disturbance uncertainty relation. Such quantum backaction is typically difficult to observe at room temperature where the motion driven by optical quantum intensity fluctuations is many orders of magnitude smaller than the thermal motion. We demonstrate a cross-correlation technique to distinguish optically driven motion from thermally driven motion, observing this quantum backaction signature up to …
We consider an optomechanical cavity made by two moving mirrors which contains a Kerr-down conversion nonlinear crystal. We show that the coherent oscillations of the two mechanical oscil- lators can lead to splitting in the electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) resonance, and appearance of an absorption peak within the transparency window. In this configuration the coher- ent induced splitting of EIT is similar to driving a hyperfine transition in an atomic Lambda-type three-level system by a radio-frequency or microwave field. Also, we show that the presence of non- linearity provid…
Recently, the photon absorption attracts lots of interest and plays an important role in a variety of applications. Here, we propose a valuable scheme to investigate the perfect photon absorption in a hybrid atom-optomechanical system both under and beyond the low-excitation limit. The perfect photon absorption persists both in the linear atomic excitation regime and nonlinear atomic excitation regime, below the threshold of the optical bistability/multistability, respectively. We also show that the optical nonlinearity raised by the nonlinear optomechanical interaction and nonlinear atomic ex…
We propose and analyze a circuit that implements a nonlinear coupling between two superconducting microwave resonators. The resonators are coupled through a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) that terminates one of the resonators. This produces a nonlinear interaction on the standard optomechanical form, where the quadrature of one resonator couples to the photon number of the other resonator. The circuit therefore allows for all-electrical realizations of analogs to optomechanical systems, with coupling that can be both strong and tunable. We estimate the coupling strengths t…
We solve the time evolution of a nonlinear optomechanical Hamiltonian with arbitrary time-dependent mechanical displacement, mechanical single-mode squeezing and a time-dependent optomechanical coupling up to the solution of two second-order differential equations. The solution is based on identifying a minimal and finite Lie algebra that generates the time-evolution of the system. This reduces the problem to considering a finite set of coupled ordinary differential equations of real functions. To demonstrate the applicability of our method, we compute the degree of non-Gaussianity of the time…
Regular and chaotic dynamics of nonlinear optomechanical systems controlled by modulated light
Scientific-Practical Material Research Centre, Belarus National Academy of Sciences（白俄罗斯科学院科学实用材料研究中心）；Institute of Molecular Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院分子物理研究所）
We investigate the effects of atomic collisions as well as optomechanical mirror-field coupling on the optical bistability in a hybrid system consisting of a Bose-Einstein condensate inside a driven optical cavity with a moving end mirror. It is shown that the bistability of the system can be controlled by the s-wave scattering frequency which can provide the possibility of realizing a controllable optical switch. On the other hand, by studying the effect of the Bogoliubov mode, as a secondary mechanical mode relative to the mirror vibrations, on the cooling process as well as the bipartite mi…
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.
Optomechanical systems provide a unique platform for observing quantum behavior of macroscopic objects. However, efforts towards realizing nonlinear behavior at the single photon level have been inhibited by the small size of the radiation pressure interaction. Here we show that it is not necessary to reach the single-photon strong-coupling regime in order to realize significant optomechanical nonlinearities. Instead, nonlinearities at the few quanta level can be achieved, even with weak-coupling, in a two-mode optomechanical system driven near instability. In this limit, we establish a new fi…
We consider how nonlinear interaction effects can manifest themselves and even be enhanced in a strongly driven optomechanical system. Using a Keldysh Green's function approach, we calculate modifications to the cavity density of states due to both linear and nonlinear optomechanical interactions, showing that strong modifications can arise even for a weak nonlinear interaction. We show how this quantity can be directly probed in an optomechanically-induced transparency type experiment. We also show how the enhanced interaction can lead to nonclassical behaviour, as evidenced by the behaviour …
With a perturbative treatment based on the Keldysh Green's function technique, we study the resonant enhancement of nonlinear interaction effects in a four-mode optomechanical ring. In such a system, we identify five distinct types of resonant scattering between unperturbed polariton modes, induced by the nonlinear optomechanical interaction. By computing the cavity density of states and optomechanical induced transparency signal, we find that the largest nonlinear effects are induced by a decay process involving the two phonon-like polaritons. In contrast to the conventional two-mode optomech…
Optomechanical systems have been shown both theoretically and experimentally to exhibit an analogon to atomic electromagnetically induced transparency, with sharp transmission features that are controlled by a second laser beam. Here we investigate these effects in the regime where the fundamental nonlinear nature of the optomechanical interaction becomes important. We demonstrate that pulsed transistor-like switching of transmission still works even in this regime. We also show that optomechanically induced transparency at the second mechanical sideband could be a sensitive tool to see first …
A scheme is presented to optimize the optomechanical cooling of mechanical resonator in instability regime. Based on the stability analysis, we uncovered a distinct bistable effect of photons and phonons, which can be used to realize a strong nonlinear effect even in the single-photon weak coupling regime. Considering the experimental realization, we investigate the sideband cooling in bistable regime with and without quantum nonlinearity. It is shown that the fluctuation of the steady state phonons can be excellently suppressed at a rather low level due to the anti-rotating-wave effect, and i…
Self-Sustained Oscillations of a Nonlinear Optomechanical System in the Low-Excitation Regime
Institute for Quantum Materials and Technology, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院量子材料与技术研究所）；Walther-Meißner-Institut, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften（巴伐利亚科学院瓦尔特·迈斯纳研究所）；Physics Department, TUM School of Natural Sciences, Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学自然科学学院物理系）；Munich Center for Quantum Science and Technology (MCQST)（慕尼黑量子科学与技术中心）；Institute for Theory of Condensed Matter, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院凝聚态理论研究所）；Institut de Science et d’Ingénierie Supramoléculaires (ISIS, UMR7006), University of Strasbourg and CNRS（斯特拉斯堡大学与法国国家科学研究中心超分子科学与工程研究所）
We study the fundamental sensitivity that can be achieved with an ideal optomechanical system in the nonlinear regime for measurements of time-dependent gravitational fields. Using recently developed methods to solve the dynamics of a nonlinear optomechanical system with a time-dependent Hamiltonian, we compute the quantum Fisher information for linear displacements of the mechanical element due to gravity. We demonstrate that the sensitivity can not only be further enhanced by injecting squeezed states of the cavity field, but also by modulating the light--matter coupling of the optomechanica…
Based on photon-phonon nonlinear interaction, a scheme is proposed to realize a controllable multi-path photon-phonon converter at single-quantum level in a composed quadratically coupled optomechanical system. Considering the realization of the scheme, an associated mechanical oscillator is introduced to enhance the effective nonlinear effect. Thus, the single-photon state can be converted to the phonon state with high fidelity even under the current experimental condition that the single-photon coupling rate is much smaller than mechanical frequency ($g\llω_m$). The state transfer protocols …
The observation of phonon blockade in a nanomechanical oscillator is clear evidence of its quantum nature. However, it is still a severe challenge to measure the strong phonon blockade in an optomechanical system with effective nonlinear coupling. In this paper, we propose a theoretical proposal for detecting the phonon blockade effect in a quadratically coupled optomechanical system by exploiting supervised machine learning. The detected optical signals are injected into the neural network as the input, while the output is the mechanical equal-time second-order correlation. Our results show o…
Hybrid optomechanical systems are emerging as a fruitful architecture for quantum technologies. Hence, determining the relevant atom-light and light-mechanics couplings is an essential task in such systems. The fingerprint of these couplings is left in the global state of the system during non-equilibrium dynamics. However, in practice, performing measurements on the entire system is not feasible, and thus, one has to rely on partial access to one of the subsystems, namely the atom, the light, or the mechanics. Here, we perform a comprehensive analysis to determine the optimal subsystem for pr…
A major goal in optomechanics is to observe and control quantum behavior in a system consisting of a mechanical resonator coupled to an optical cavity. Work towards this goal has focused on increasing the strength of the coupling between the mechanical and optical degrees of freedom; however, the form of this coupling is crucial in determining which phenomena can be observed in such a system. Here we demonstrate that avoided crossings in the spectrum of an optical cavity containing a flexible dielectric membrane allow us to realize several different forms of the optomechanical coupling. These …
Intracavity squeezing is a promising technique that may improve the sensitivity of gravitational wave detectors and cool optomechanical oscillators to the ground state. However, the photothermal effect may modify the occurrence of optomechanical coupling due to the presence of a nonlinear optical crystal in an optical cavity. We propose a novel method to predict the influence of the photothermal effect by measuring the susceptibility of the optomechanical oscillator and identifying the net optical spring constant and photothermal absorption rate. Using this method, we succeeded in precisely es…
Quantum squeezing in mechanical systems is not only a key signature of macroscopic quantum effects, but can also be utilized to advance the metrology of weak forces. Here we show that strong mechanical squeezing in the steady state can be generated in an optomechanical system with mechanical nonlinearity and red-detuned monochromatic driving on the cavity mode. The squeezing is achieved as the joint effect of nonlinearity-induced parametric amplification and cavity cooling, and is robust against thermal fluctuations of the mechanical mode.
Nonlinear optomechanical coupling is the basis for many potential future experiments in quantum optomechanics (e.g., quantum non-demolition measurements, preparation of non-classical states), which to date have been difficult to realize due to small non-linearity in typical optomechanical devices. Here we introduce an optomechanical system combining strong nonlinear optomechanical coupling, low mass and large optical mode spacing. This nanoscale "paddle nanocavity" supports mechanical resonances with hundreds of fg mass which couple nonlinearly to optical modes with a quadratic optomechanical …
We report on cooling the center-of-mass motion of a nanoparticle due to a purely quadratic coupling between its motion and the optical field of a high finesse cavity. The resulting interaction gives rise to a Van der Pol nonlinear damping, which is analogous to conventional parametric feedback where the cavity provides passive feedback without measurement. We show experimentally that like feedback cooling the resulting energy distribution is strongly nonthermal and can be controlled by the nonlinear damping of the cavity. As quadratic coupling has a prominent role in proposed protocols to gene…
Nanoscale photonic crystal cavity optomechanical devices enable detection of nanomechanical phenomena with a sensitivity sufficient to observe quantum effects. Here we present the design of a one-dimensional air-mode photonic crystal cavity patterned in a silicon nitride nanobeam, and show that it forms the basis for cavity optomechanical split-beam and paddle nanocavity devices useful for force detection and nonlinear quantum sensing. The air-mode of this device is advantageous for optomechanical coupling, while also having ultrahigh optical quality factor $Q_o\sim 10^6$ despite its proximity…
Optomechanical devices have been cooled to ground-state and genuine quantum features, as well as long-predicted nonlinear phenomena, have been observed. When packing close enough more than one optomechanical unit in the same substrate the question arises as to whether collective or independent dissipation channels are the correct description of the system. Here we explore the effects arising when introducing dissipative couplings between mechanical degrees of freedom. We investigate synchronization, entanglement and cooling, finding that collective dissipation can drive synchronization even in…
We propose a scheme to prepare macroscopic quantum superpositions of motion in optomachanical nano- or micromechanical oscillators quadratically coupled to an intracavity field. The nonlinear optomechanical coupling leads to an effective degenerate three-wave mixing interaction between the mechanical and cavity modes. The quantum superpositions result from the combined effects of the interaction and cavity dissipation. We show analytically and confirm numerically that various deterministic quantum superpositions can be achieved, depending on initial mechanical state. The effect of mechanical d…
The nonlinear quantum regime is crucial for implementing interesting quantum effects, which have wide applications in modern quantum science. Here we propose an effective method to reach the nonlinear quantum regime in a modulated optomechanical system (OMS), which is originally in the weak-coupling regime. The mechanical spring constant and optomechanical interaction are modulated periodically. This leads to the result that the resonant optomechanical interaction can be effectively enhanced into the single-photon strong-coupling regime by the modulation-induced mechanical parametric amplifica…
