The Casimir force between uncharged metallic surfaces originates from quantum mechanical zero point fluctuations of the electromagnetic field. We demonstrate that this quantum electrodynamical effect has a profound influence on the oscillatory behavior of microstructures when surfaces are in close proximity (<= 100 nm). Frequency shifts, hysteretic behavior and bistability caused by the Casimir force are observed in the frequency response of a periodically driven micromachined torsional oscillator.
Quantum fluctuations give rise to van der Waals and Casimir forces that dominate the interaction between electrically neutral objects at sub-micron separations. Under the trend of miniaturization, such quantum electrodynamical effects are expected to play an important role in micro- and nano-mechanical devices. Nevertheless, utilization of Casimir forces on the chip level remains a major challenge because all experiments so far require an external object to be manually positioned close to the mechanical element. Here, by integrating a force-sensing micromechanical beam and an electrostatic act…
Cooling a mesoscopic mechanical oscillator to its quantum ground state is elementary for the preparation and control of low entropy quantum states of large scale objects. Here, we pre-cool a 70-MHz micromechanical silica oscillator to an occupancy below 200 quanta by thermalizing it with a 600-mK cold 3He gas. Two-level system induced damping via structural defect states is shown to be strongly reduced, and simultaneously serves as novel thermometry method to independently quantify excess heating due to the cooling laser. We demonstrate that dynamical backaction sideband cooling can reduce the…
In this paper, we propose a scheme for generating steady-state entanglement of remote micromechanical oscillators in unidirectionally-coupled cavities. For the system of two mechanical oscillators, we show that when two cavity modes in each cavity are driven at red- and blue-detuned sidebands, respectively, a stationary two-mode squeezed vacuum state of the two mechanical oscillators can be generated with the help of the cavity dissipation. The degree of squeezing is controllable by adjusting the relative strength of the pump lasers. Our calculations also show that the achieved mechanical enta…
We want to study the dynamics of a simple linear harmonic micro spring which is under the influence of the quantum Casimir force/pressure and thus behaves as a (an) nonlinear (anharmonic) Casimir oscillator. Generally,the equation of motion of this nonlinear micromechanical Casimir oscillator has no exact solvable (analytical)solution and the turning point(s) of the system has (have) no fixed position(s); however, for particular values of the stiffness of the micro spring and at appropriately well-chosen distance scales and conditions, there is (are) approximately sinusoidal solution(s) for th…
This article reviews recent research towards a universal light-matter interface. Such an interface is an important prerequisite for long distance quantum communication, entanglement assisted sensing and measurement, as well as for scalable photonic quantum computation. We review the developments in light-matter interfaces based on room temperature atomic vapors interacting with propagating pulses via the Faraday effect. This interaction has long been used as a tool for quantum nondemolition detections of atomic spins via light. It was discovered recently that this type of light-matter interact…
We propose a quantum description of the cooling of a micromechanical flexural oscillator by a one-dimensional transmission line resonator via a force that resembles cavity radiation pressure. The mechanical oscillator is capacitively coupled to the central conductor of the transmission line resonator. At the optimal point, the micromechanical oscillator can be cooled close to the ground state, and the cooling can be measured by homodyne detection of the output microwave signal.
The observation of quantum phenomena in macroscopic mechanical oscillators has been a subject of interest since the inception of quantum mechanics. Prerequisite to this regime are both preparation of the mechanical oscillator at low phonon occupancy and a measurement sensitivity at the scale of the spread of the oscillator's ground state wavefunction. It has been widely perceived that the most promising approach to address these two challenges are electro nanomechanical systems. Here we approach for the first time the quantum regime with a mechanical oscillator of mesoscopic dimensions--discer…
Ground state cooling of micromechanical oscillator is a paradigmatic goal for observing quantum mechanical effects in cavity optomechanics. We study theoretically the ground state cooling of a mechanical oscillator in an optomechanical cavity in presence of a quantum well placed inside the cavity. Due to mode tailoring in presence of the quantum well, the cavity response gets modified and leads to asymmetric heating and cooling processes. This facilitates the cooling of the mechanical oscillator even in the unresolved-sideband regime, via inhibition of Stokes scattering.
We report experiments in which the vibrations of a micromechanical oscillator are coupled to the motion of Bose-condensed atoms in a trap. The interaction relies on surface forces experienced by the atoms at about one micrometer distance from the mechanical structure. We observe resonant coupling to several well-resolved mechanical modes of the condensate. Coupling via surface forces does not require magnets, electrodes, or mirrors on the oscillator and could thus be employed to couple atoms to molecular-scale oscillators such as carbon nanotubes.
We consider experiments on measuring the Casimir interaction which have been performed in the last four years. The emphasis is made on measuring differences in the Casimir pressures under a transition of the plate metal from normal to superconducting state and on the Casimir metrology platform using a commercial micromechanical sensor. In both cases several problems in the comparison between experiment and theory are discussed.
We report measurements of the Casimir force between a gold sphere and a silicon surface with an array of nanoscale, rectangular corrugations using a micromechanical torsional oscillator. At distance between 150 nm and 500 nm, the measured force shows significant deviations from the pairwise additive formulism, demonstrating the strong dependence of the Casimir force on the shape of the interacting bodies. The observed deviation, however, is smaller than the calculated values for perfectly conducting surfaces, possibly due to the interplay between finite conductivity and geometry effects.
The ground state cooling of a mechanical oscillator in an optomechanical cavity containing an ensemble of identical two-level ground-state atoms is studied in the highly unresolved-sideband regime. The system exhibits electromagnetically-induced transparency-like quantum interference effect. The mutual interaction with the cavity optical field gives rise to an indirect coupling between the atomic and mechanical modes. In presence of this interaction, the noise spectrum gets modified and leads to asymmetric cooling and heating rates. Using the quantum master equation, time evolution of the aver…
Multimode optomechanical systems are an emerging platform for studying fundamental aspects of matter near the quantum ground state and are useful in sensitive sensing and measurement applications. We study optomechanical cooling in a system where two nearly degenerate mechanical oscillators are coupled to a single microwave cavity. Due to an optically mediated coupling the two oscillators hybridize into a bright mode with strong optomechanical cooling rate and a dark mode nearly decoupled from the system. We find that at high coupling, sideband cooling of the dark mode is strongly suppressed. …
Micro- and nanoscale opto-mechanical systems provide radiation pressure coupling of optical and mechanical degree of freedom and are actively pursued for their ability to explore quantum mechanical phenomena of macroscopic objects. Many of these investigations require preparation of the mechanical system in or close to its quantum ground state. Remarkable progress in ground state cooling has been achieved for trapped ions and atoms confined in optical lattices. Imperative to this progress has been the technique of resolved sideband cooling, which allows overcoming the inherent temperature limi…
Physical systems with gain and loss can be described by a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian, which is degenerated at the exceptional points (EPs). Many new and unexpected features have been explored in the non-Hermitian systems with a great deal of recent interest. One of the most fascinating features is that, chiral state conversion appears when one EP is encircled dynamically. Here, we propose an easy-controllable levitated microparticle system that carries a pair of EPs and realize slow evolution of the Hamiltonian along loops in the parameter plane. Utilizing the controllable rotation angle, gain …
We cool the fundamental mode of a miniature cantilever by capacitively coupling it to a driven rf resonant circuit. Cooling results from the rf capacitive force, which is phase shifted relative to the cantilever motion. We demonstrate the technique by cooling a 7 kHz cantilever from room temperature to 45 K, obtaining reasonable agreement with a model for the cooling, damping, and frequency shift. Extending the method to higher frequencies in a cryogenic system could enable ground state cooling and may prove simpler than related optical experiments in a low temperature apparatus.
We propose an experiment to create and verify entanglement between remote mechanical objects by use of an optomechanical interferometer. Two optical cavities, each coupled to a separate mechanical oscillator, are coherently driven such that the oscillators are laser cooled to the quantum regime. The entanglement is induced by optical measurement and comes about by combining the output from the two cavities to erase which-path information. It can be verified through measurements of degrees of second-order coherence of the optical output field. The experiment is feasible in the regime of weak op…
The applicability of the Lifshitz formula is discussed to the case of two thick parallel plates made of real metal. The usual description of the zero-point vacuum oscillations on the background of the frequency-dependent dielectric permittivity is shown to be in contradiction with thermodynamics. Instead, the Lifshitz formula for the Casimir free energy should be reformulated in terms of the reflection coefficients containing the surface impedance instead of the dielectric permittivity. This approach is presently confirmed experimentally by precision measurements of the van der Waals and Casim…
We provide a general framework to describe cooling of a micromechanical oscillator to its quantum ground state by means of radiation-pressure coupling with a driven optical cavity. We apply it to two experimentally realized schemes, back-action cooling via a detuned cavity and cold-damping quantum-feedback cooling, and we determine the ultimate quantum limits of both schemes for the full parameter range of a stable cavity. While both allow to reach the oscillator's quantum ground state, we find that back-action cooling is more efficient in the good cavity limit, i.e. when the cavity bandwidth …
We compare the results of capacitance measurements in the lens-plane and sphere-plane configurations with theoretical predictions from various models of a spherical surface. It is shown that capacitance measurements are incapable of discriminating between models of perfect and modified spherical surfaces in an experiment demonstrating the anomalous scaling law for the electric force. Claims to the contrary in the recent literature are explained by the use of irregular comparison. The data from capacitance measurements in an experiment measuring the Casimir force using a micromechanical torsion…
We review new constraints on the Yukawa-type corrections to Newtonian gravity obtained recently from gravitational experiments and from the measurements of the Casimir force. Special attention is paid to the constraints following from the most precise dynamic determination of the Casimir pressure between the two parallel plates by means of a micromechanical torsional oscillator. The possibility of setting limits on the predictions of chameleon field theories using the results of gravitational experiments and Casimir force measurements is discussed.
We consider two three-dimensional isotropic harmonic oscillators interacting with the quantum electromagnetic field in the Coulomb gauge and within dipole approximation. Using a Bogoliubov-like transformation, we can obtain transformed operators such that the Hamiltonian of the system, when expressed in terms of these operators, assumes a diagonal form. We are also able to obtain an expression for the energy shift of the ground state, which is valid at all orders in the coupling constant. From this energy shift the nonperturbative Casimir-Polder potential energy between the two oscillators can…
We establish an explicit analogy between the dynamical Casimir effect and the photon emission of a thin non-linear crystal pumped inside a cavity. This allows us to propose a system based on a type-I optical parametric oscillator (OPO) to simulate a cavity oscillating in vacuum at optical frequencies. The resulting photon flux is expected to be more easily detectable than with a mechanical excitation of the mirrors. We conclude by comparing different theoretical predictions and suggest that our experimental proposal could help discriminate between them.
Entanglement, an essential feature of quantum theory that allows for inseparable quantum correlations to be shared between distant parties, is a crucial resource for quantum networks. Of particular importance is the ability to distribute entanglement between remote objects that can also serve as quantum memories. This has been previously realized using systems such as warm and cold atomic vapours, individual atoms and ions, and defects in solid-state systems. Practical communication applications require a combination of several advantageous features, such as a particular operating wavelength, …
It was predicted some time ago that the cavity dynamical Casimir effect (generation of photons from the initial vacuum state in a cavity with moving walls) might be observed if a boundary vibrates at the double frequency of some selected cavity mode. However, to register the created photons one has to couple the cavity mode with some detector. Considering the harmonic oscillator model of a detector, we analyze how different coupling regimes can affect the statistics of the created quanta.
The normal Casimir force between a sinusoidally corrugated gold coated plate and a sphere was measured at various angles between the corrugations using an atomic force microscope. A strong dependence on the orientation angle of the corrugation is found. The measured forces were found to deviate from the proximity force approximation and are in agreement with the theory based on the gradient expansion including correlation effects of geometry and material properties. We analyze the role of temperature. The obtained results open new opportunities for control of the Casimir effect in micromechani…
Mechanical systems facilitate the development of a new generation of hybrid quantum technology comprising electrical, optical, atomic and acoustic degrees of freedom. Entanglement is the essential resource that defines this new paradigm of quantum enabled devices. Continuous variable (CV) entangled fields, known as Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) states, are spatially separated two-mode squeezed states that can be used to implement quantum teleportation and quantum communication. In the optical domain, EPR states are typically generated using nondegenerate optical amplifiers and at microwave fre…
The Casimir friction problem can be dealt with in a simplified way by considering two harmonic oscillators moving with constant relative velocity. Recently we calculated the energy dissipation for such a case, [EPL {\bf 91}, 60003 (2010); Europ. Phys. J. D {\bf 61}, 335 (2011)]. A recent study of Barton [New J. Phys. {\bf 12}, 113044 (2010)] seemingly leads to a different result for the dissipation. If such a discrepancy really were true, it would imply a delicate difficulty for the basic theory of Casimir friction. In the present note we show that the expressions for the dissipation are in fa…
This paper is a second in a series devoted to the study of a two-oscillator system in linear relative motion (the first one published as a letter in Europhys. Lett. 91, 60003 (2010)). The main idea behind considering this kind of system is to use it as a simple model for Casimir friction. In the present paper we extend our previous theory so as to obtain the change in the oscillator energy to second order in the perturbation, even though we employ first order perturbation theory only. The results agree with, and confirm, our earlier results obtained via different routes. The friction force is …
In this paper we consider a quantum harmonic oscillator interacting with the electromagnetic radiation field in the presence of a boundary condition preserving the continuous spectrum of the field, such as an infinite perfectly conducting plate. Using an appropriate Bogoliubov-type transformation we can diagonalize exactly the Hamiltonian of our system in the continuum limit and obtain non-perturbative expressions for its ground-state energy. From the expressions found, the atom-wall Casimir-Polder interaction energy can be obtained, and well-know lowest-order results are recovered as a limiti…
The Casimir friction problem for a pair of dielectric particles in relative motion is analyzed, utilizing a microscopic model in which we start from statistical mechanics for harmonically oscillating particles at finite temperature moving nonrelativistically with constant velocity. The use of statistical mechanics in this context has in our opinion some definite advantages, in comparison with the more conventional quantum electrodynamic description of media that involves the use of a refractive index. The statistical-mechanical description is physical and direct, and the oscillator model, in s…
We report on the design, fabrication, and implementation of ultrasensitive micromechanical oscillators. Our ultrathin single-crystal silicon cantilevers with integrated magnetic structures are the first of their kind: They are fabricated using a novel high-yield process in which magnetic film patterning and deposition are combined with cantilever fabrication. These novel devices have been developed for use as cantilever magnetometers and as force sensors in nuclear magnetic resonance force microscopy (MRFM). These two applications have achieved nanometer-scale resolution using the cantilevers …
A "microscopic" justification of the "symmetric damping" model of a quantum oscillator with time-dependent frequency and time-dependent damping is given. This model is used to predict results of experiments on simulating the dynamical Casimir effect in a cavity with a photo-excited semiconductor mirror. It is shown that the most general bilinear time-dependent coupling of a selected oscillator (field mode) to a bath of harmonic oscillators results in two equal friction coefficients for the both quadratures, provided all the coupling coefficients are proportional to a single arbitrary function …
A micromechanical torsion oscillator has been used to strengthen the limits on new Yukawa forces by determining the Casimir pressure between two gold-coated plates. By significantly reducing the random errors and obtaining the electronic parameters of the gold coatings, we were able to conclusively exclude the predictions of large thermal effects below 1 $μ$m and strengthen the constraints on Yukawa corrections to Newtonian gravity in the interaction range from 29.5 nm to 86 nm.
The interaction between arbitrary dielectric heterostructures is studied within the framework of a recently developed dielectric contrast perturbation theory. It is shown that periodically patterned dielectric or metallic structures lead to oscillatory lateral Casimir-Lifshitz forces, as well as modulations in the normal force as they are displaced with respect to one another. The strength of these oscillatory contributions increases with decreasing gap size and increasing contrast in the dielectric properties of the materials used in the heterostructures.
Negative entropy in connection with the Casimir effect at uniform temperature is a phenomenon rooted in the circumstance that one is describing a nonclosed system, or only part of a closed system. In this paper we show that the phenomenon is not necessarily restricted to electromagnetic theory, but can be derived from the quantum theory of interacting harmonic oscillators, most typically two oscillators interacting not directly but indirectly via a third one. There are two such models, actually analogous to the transverse magnetic (TM) and transverse electric (TE) modes in electrodynamics. The…
A differential measurement scheme is proposed which allows for a clear observation of the giant thermal effect for the Casimir force, that was recently predicted to occur in graphene systems at short separation distances. The difference among the Casimir forces acting between a metal-coated sphere and the two halves of a dielectric plate, one uncoated and the other coated with graphene, is calculated in the framework of the Dirac model using the rigorous formalism of the polarization tensor. It is shown that in the proposed configuration both the difference among the Casimir forces and its the…
We address estimation of temperature for a micromechanical oscillator lying arbitrarily close to its quantum ground state. Motivated by recent experiments, we assume that the oscillator is coupled to a probe qubit via Jaynes-Cummings interaction and that the estimation of its effective temperature is achieved via quantum limited measurements on the qubit. We first consider the ideal unitary evolution in a noiseless environment and then take into account the noise due to non dissipative decoherence. We exploit local quantum estimation theory to assess and optimize the precision of estimation pr…
The advent of laser cooling techniques revolutionized the study of many atomic-scale systems. This has fueled progress towards quantum computers by preparing trapped ions in their motional ground state, and generating new states of matter by achieving Bose-Einstein condensation of atomic vapors. Analogous cooling techniques provide a general and flexible method for preparing macroscopic objects in their motional ground state, bringing the powerful technology of micromechanics into the quantum regime. Cavity opto- or electro-mechanical systems achieve sideband cooling through the strong interac…
Quantum control of engineered mechanical oscillators can be achieved by coupling the oscillator to an auxiliary degree of freedom, provided that the coherent rate of energy exchange exceeds the decoherence rate of each of the two sub-systems. We achieve such quantum-coherent coupling between the mechanical and optical modes of a micro-optomechanical system. Simultaneously, the mechanical oscillator is cooled to an average occupancy of n = 1.7 \pm 0.1 motional quanta. Pulsed optical excitation reveals the exchange of energy between the optical light field and the micromechanical oscillator in t…
Casimir effect is the attractive force which acts between two plane parallel, closely spaced, uncharged, metallic plates in vacuum. This phenomenon was predicted theoretically in 1948 and reliably investigated experimentally only in recent years. In fact, the Casimir force is similar to the familiar van der Waals force in the case of relatively large separations when the relativistic effects come into play. We review the most important experiments on measuring the Casimir force by means of torsion pendulum, atomic force microscope and micromechanical torsional oscillator. Special attention is …
Dynamical Casimir effect (DCE) is the name assigned to the process of generating quanta from vacuum due to an accelerated motion of macroscopic neutral bodies (mirrors) or time-modulation of cavity material properties, as well as the simulation of such processes. Here I review the theoretical results on the detection of DCE using intracavity quantum detectors, such as multi-level atoms, atomic networks and harmonic oscillators. I also stress the mathematical equivalence of this problem to the physics of optical parametric oscillators interacting with atoms or quantum wells, studied in Quantum …
We investigate the Casimir energy between two dissipative mirrors in term of a sum over mode formula which can be interpreted by analogy to a quantum dissipative oscillator. We also show that metamaterials engineered at scales between the nanometer and the micron seem a promising way to achieve a repulsive force.
In the current work we present the complete results for the measurement of normal Casimir force between shallow and smooth sinusoidally corrugated gold coated sphere and a plate at various angles between the corrugations using an atomic force microscope. All measured data were compared with the theoretical approach using the proximity force approximation and theory based on derivative expansion. In both cases real material properties of the surfaces and non-zero temperature were taken into account. Special attention is paid to the description of electrostatic interactions between corrugated su…
This work is a continuation of our recent series of papers on Casimir friction, for a pair of particles of low relative particle velocity. Each particle is modeled as a simple harmonic oscillator. Our basic method, as before, is the use of quantum mechanical statistical mechanics, involving the Kubo formula, at finite temperature. In this work we begin by analyzing the Casimir friction between two particles polarizable in all spatial directions, this being a generalization of our study in EPL 91, 60003 (2010), which was restricted to a pair of particles with longitudinal polarization only. For…
Within the framework of macroscopic quantum electrodynamics, general expressions for the Casimir force acting on linearly and causally responding magnetodielectric bodies that can be embedded in another linear and causal magnetodielectric medium are derived. Consistency with microscopic harmonic-oscillator models of the matter is shown. The theory is applied to planar structures and proper generalizations of Casimir's and Lifshitz-type formulas are given.
We investigate the possibility of measuring the thermal Casimir force and its gradient in the configuration of a plate and a microfabricated cylinder attached to a micromachined oscillator. The Lifshitz-type formulas in this configuration are derived using the proximity force approximation. The accuracy for the obtained expressions is determined from a comparison with exact results available in ideal metal case. Computations of the thermal correction to both the Casimir force and its gradient are performed in the framework of different theoretical approaches proposed in the literature. The cor…
Casimir friction is analyzed for a pair of dielectric particles in relative motion. We first adopt a microscopic model for harmonically oscillating particles at finite temperature T moving non-relativistically with constant velocity. We use a statistical-mechanical description where time-dependent correlations are involved. This description is physical and direct, and, in spite of its simplicity, is able to elucidate the essentials of the problem. This treatment elaborates upon, and extends, an earlier theory of ours back in 1992. The energy change Delta E turns out to be finite in general, co…
We discuss the Casimir effect between two identical, parallel slabs, emphasizing the role of dissipation and temperature. Starting from quite general assumptions, we analyze the behavior of the Casimir entropy in the limit T->0 and link it to the behavior of the slab's reflection coefficients at low frequencies. We also derive a formula in terms of a sum over modes, valid for dissipative slabs that can be interpreted in terms of a damped quantum oscillator.
It is demonstrated that the general theory of Casimir and van der Waals forces describes the interaction-induced equilibrium thermodynamic potentials of the damped harmonic oscillator bilinearly coupled to the environment. An extended model for a damped oscillator is suggested along the lines of the general theory of Casimir and van der Waals forces, and the corresponding thermodynamic quantities obtained. While the original model involves a heat bath consisting of a large number of free oscillators having infinitesimal damping functions, the extended model allows any generally admissible freq…
A fundamental prediction of quantum mechanics is that there are random fluctuations everywhere in a vacuum because of the zero-point energy. Remarkably, quantum electromagnetic fluctuations can induce a measurable force between neutral objects, known as the Casimir effect, which has attracted broad interests. The Casimir effect can dominate the interaction between microstructures at small separations and has been utilized to realize nonlinear oscillation, quantum trapping, phonon transfer, and dissipation dilution. However, a non-reciprocal device based on quantum vacuum fluctuations remains a…
Asymptotical formulas for the photon distribution function of a quantum oscillator with time-dependent frequency and damping coefficients, interacting with a thermal reservoir, are derived in the case of a large mean number of quanta. Different regimes of excitation of an initial thermal state with an arbitrary temperature are considered. New formulas are used to predict the statistical properties of the electromagnetic field created in the experiments on the Dynamical Casimir Effect which are now under preparation.
A general, exact formula is derived for the expectation value of the electromagnetic energy density of an inhomogeneous absorbing and dispersive dielectric medium in thermal equilibrium, assuming that the medium is well approximated as a continuum. From this formula we obtain the formal expression for the Casimir force density. Unlike most previous approaches to Casimir effects in which absorption is either ignored or admitted implicitly through the required analytic properties of the permittivity, we include dissipation explicitly via the coupling of each dipole oscillator of the medium to a …
Role of the Casimir force in the capacitive radio-frequency microelectromechanical switches
Central Astronomical Observatory at Pulkovo of the Russian Academy of Sciences（俄罗斯科学院普尔科沃中央天文台）；Peter the Great Saint Petersburg Polytechnic University（彼得大帝圣彼得堡理工大学）
It is well known that, beginning in 2000, the behavior of the thermal correction to the Casimir force between real metals has been hotly debated. As was shown by several research groups, the Lifshitz theory, which provides the theoretical foundation for the calculation of both the van der Waals and Casimir forces, leads to different results depending on the model of metal conductivity used. To resolve these controversies, the theoretical considerations based on the principles of thermodynamics and new experimental tests were invoked. We analyze the present status of the problem (in particular,…
We develop a QED approach to find the contribution of the quantum vacuum to the electromagnetic Abraham force. Semi-classical theories predict diverging contributions from the quantum vacuum. We show that the divergencies disappear by Kramers-Bethe mass-renormalization. The finite remainder is compared to the relativistic corrections to the Abraham force. This work generalizes an earlier paper [1], dedicated to the harmonic oscillator, to the hydrogen atom and corrects two subtle errors.
At separations below 100 nm, Casimir-Lifshitz forces strongly influence the actuation dynamics of micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) in dry vacuum conditions. For a micron size plate oscillating near a surface, which mimics a frequently used setup in experiments with MEMS, we show that the roughness of the surfaces significantly influences the qualitative dynamics of the oscillator. Via a combination of analytical and numerical methods, it is shown that surface roughness leads to a clear increase of initial conditions associated with chaotic motion, that eventually lead to stiction between…
Engineering strong interactions between quantum systems is essential for many phenomena of quantum physics and technology. Typically, strong coupling relies on short-range forces or on placing the systems in high-quality electromagnetic resonators, restricting the range of the coupling to small distances. We use a free-space laser beam to strongly couple a collective atomic spin and a micromechanical membrane over a distance of one meter in a room-temperature environment. The coupling is highly tunable and allows the observation of normal-mode splitting, coherent energy exchange oscillations, …
