We study a parametrically driven nanomechanical resonator capacitively coupled to a microwave cavity. If the nanoresonator can be cooled to near its quantum ground state then quantum squeezing of a quadrature of the nanoresonator motion becomes feasible. We consider the adiabatic limit in which the cavity mode is slaved to the nanoresonator mode. By driving the cavity on its red-detuned sideband, the squeezing can be coupled into the microwave field at the cavity resonance. The red-detuned sideband drive is also compatible with the goal of ground state cooling. Squeezing of the output microwave field may be inferred using a technique similar to that used to infer squeezing of the field produced by a Josephson parametric amplifier, and subsequently, squeezing of the nanoresonator motion may be inferred. We have calculated the output field microwave squeezing spectra and related this to squeezing of the nanoresonator motion, both at zero and finite temperature. Driving the cavity on the blue-detuned sideband, and on both the blue and red sidebands, have also been considered within the same formalism.
We study a parametrically driven nanomechanical resonator capacitively coupled to a microwave cavity. If the nanoresonator can be cooled to near its quantum ground state then quantum squeezing of a quadrature of the nanoresonator motion becomes feasible. We consider the adiabatic limit in which the cavity mode is slaved to the nanoresonator mode. By driving the cavity on its red-detuned sideband, the squeezing can be coupled into the microwave field at the cavity resonance. The red-detuned sideband drive is also compatible with the goal of ground state cooling. Squeezing of the output microwave field may be inferred using a technique similar to that used to infer squeezing of the field produced by a Josephson parametric amplifier, and subsequently, squeezing of the nanoresonator motion may be inferred. We have calculated the output field microwave squeezing spectra and related this to squeezing of the nanoresonator motion, both at zero and finite temperature. Driving the cavity on the blue-detuned sideband, and on both the blue and red sidebands, have also been considered within the same formalism.
Quantum squeezing plays a crucial role in enhancing the precision of quantum metrology and improving the efficiency of quantum information processing protocols. We thus propose a scheme to amplify two-mode squeezing in nanomechanical resonators, harnessing parametric amplification and two-tone laser controls. The red-detuned laser drives facilitate the cooling of the nanomechanical resonators down to their ground state and allow optimal quantum state transfer in the weak-coupling, resolved sideband regime. In particular, the competing blue-detuned lasers in the driving pairs induce displacement squeezing in mechanical resonators. Thus, the quantum state transfer of the squeezing in nanomechanical resonators and the intracavity correlated photons of the parametric amplifier significantly enhance the two-mode mechanical squeezing. Notably, increasing the coupling strength of the red detuned laser and the ratio of blue-to-red detuned laser dramatically amplifies the two-mode mechanical squeezing under realistic experiment parameters of a typical optomechanical system. Our findings reveal that the proposed cooperative mechanism effectively enhances the level of two-mode mechanical squeezing with a considerable improvement and demonstrates exceptional resilience to thermal noise.
We theoretically study a driven nanomechanical resonator capacitively coupled to a superconducting microwave cavity and present a feasible way to measure the coupling strength between them in terms of the coupling-induced normal-mode splitting. The probe spectrum exhibits two sharp sideband peaks exactly located at the resonance frequency of the nanomechanical resonator, which provides us an exact way to determine the resonance frequency of the nanomechanical resonator. Our results may have a variety of potential applications such as quantum transducer and quantum information processing.
We show how to achieve strong squeezing of a microwave output field by reservoir engineering a cavity magnomechanical system, consisting of a microwave cavity, a magnon mode, and a mechanical vibration mode. The magnon mode is simultaneously driven by two microwave fields at the blue and red sidebands associated with the vibration mode. The two-tone drive induces a squeezed magnonic reservoir for the intracavity field, leading to a squeezed cavity mode due to the cavity-magnon state swapping, which further yields a squeezed cavity output field. The squeezing of the output field is stationary and substantial by using the currently available parameters in cavity magnomechanics. The work indicates the potential of the cavity magnomechanical system in preparing squeezed microwave fields, and may find promising applications in quantum information science and quantum metrology.
In this paper, we consider a cavity magnomechanical system composed of a microwave (MW) cavity, magnon, and phonon modes, where the magnon is coupled, respectively, to the MW cavity and phonon through both the magnetic-dipole and magnomechanical interactions. We demonstrate that the flux-driven Josephson parametric amplifier with a nonlinear gain is crucial in creating the squeezed states of the magnon and phonon modes. We show that, by the cavity-magnon state-swap interaction, the magnons can be completed in a squeezed state, and that the phonons can also be squeezed by driving the magnons through a strong red-detuned MW field. Essentially, our system reveals a squeezing transfer from cavity photons to magnons and then to phonons. The influence of physical and environmental parameters on the degree of squeezing is widely explored.
The application of quantum mechanics to macroscopic motion suggests many counterintuitive phenomena. While the quantum nature of the motion of individual atoms and molecules has long been successfully studied, an equivalent demonstration of the motion of a near-macroscopic structure remains a challenge in experimental physics. A nanomechanical resonator is an excellent system for such a study. It typically contains > 10 10 atoms, and it may be modeled in terms of macroscopic parameters such as bulk density and elasticity. Yet it behaves like a simple harmonic oscillator, with mass low enough and resonant frequency high enough for its quantum zero-point motion and single energy quanta to be experimentally accessible. In pursuit of quantum phenomena in a mechanical oscillator, two important goals are to prepare the oscillator in its quantum ground state, and to measure its position with a precision limited by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. In this work we have demonstrated techniques that advance towards both of these goals. Our system comprises a 30 micron × 170 nm, 2.2 pg, 5.57 MHz nanomechanical resonator capacitively coupled to a 5 GHz superconducting microwave resonator. The microwave resonator and nanomechanical resonator are fabricated together onto a single silicon chip and measured in a dilution refrigerator at temperatures below 150 mK. At these temperatures the coupling of the motion to the thermal environment is very small, resulting in a very high mechanical Q, approaching ∼ 10 6 . By driving with a microwave pump signal, we observed sidebands generated by the mechanical motion and used these to measure the thermal motion of the resonator. Applying a pump tone red-detuned from the microwave resonance, we used the microwave field to damp the mechanical resonator, extracting energy and "cooling" the motion in a manner similar to optical cooling of trapped atoms. Starting from a mode temperature of ∼ 150 mK, we reached ∼ 40 mK by this "backaction cooling" technique, corresponding to an occupation factor only ∼ 150 times above the ground state of motion. We also determined the precision of our device in measurement of position. Quantum mechanics dictates that, in a continuous position measurement, the precision may be no better than the zero-point motion of the resonator. Increasing the coupling of the resonator to detector will eventually result in back-action driving of the motion, adding imprecision and enforcing this limit. We demonstrated that our system is capable of precisions approaching this limit, and identified the primary experimental factors preventing us from reaching it: noise added to the measurement by our amplifier, and excess dissipation appearing in our microwave resonator at high pump powers. Furthermore, by applying both red- and blue-detuned phase-coherent microwave pump signals, we demonstrated back-action evading (BAE) measurement sensitive to only a single quadrature of the motion. By avoiding the back-action driving in the measured quadrature, such a technique has the potential for precisions surpassing the limit of the zero-point motion. With this method, we achieved a measurement precision of ∼ 100 fm, or 4 times the quantum zero-point motion of the mechanical resonator. We found that the measured quadrature is insensitive to back-action driving by at least a factor of 82 relative to the unmeasured quadrature. We also identified a mechanical parametric amplification effect which arises during the BAE measurement. This effect sets limits on the BAE performance but also mechanically preamplifies the motion, resulting in a position resolution 1.3 times the zero-point motion. We discuss how to overcome the experimental limits set by amplifier noise, pump power and parametric amplification. These results serve to define the path forward for demonstrating truly quantum-limited measurement and non-classical states of motion in a nearly-macroscopic object.
Abstract The cavity magnomechanical system has become a promising platform for preparing macroscopic quantum states. In this work, a scheme for generating the steady‐state quadrature squeezing of the magnon and phonon modes in a cavity magnomechanical system is presented. This scheme uses a degenerate microwave parametric amplifier (PA) inside the microwave cavity. It is found that the squeezing of the cavity mode produced by the PA can be transferred to the magnon mode due to the cavity‐magnon beamsplitter‐like interaction, and the squeezing of the magnon mode can be further transferred to the phonon mode due to the magnon‐phonon beamsplitter‐like interaction induced by driving the magnon mode with a red‐detuned microwave field. The effects of the parametric gain and phase of the PA, the magnon‐cavity coupling strength, the power of the magnon drive, and the temperature of the environment on the squeezing of the magnon and phonon modes have been evaluated. The results show that the squeezing of the magnon and phonon modes is robust against the temperature of the environment.