A process which strongly amplifies both quadrature amplitudes of an oscillatory signal necessarily adds noise. Alternatively, if the information in one quadrature is lost in phase-sensitive amplification, it is possible to completely reconstruct the other quadrature. Here we demonstrate such a nearly perfect phase-sensitive measurement using a cavity optomechanical scheme, characterized by an extremely small noise less than 0.2 quanta. The device also strongly squeezes microwave radiation by 8 dB below vacuum. A source of bright squeezed microwaves opens up applications in manipulations of quantum systems, and noiseless amplification can be used even at modest cryogenic temperatures.
A process which strongly amplifies both quadrature amplitudes of an oscillatory signal necessarily adds noise. Alternatively, if the information in one quadrature is lost in phase-sensitive amplification, it is possible to completely reconstruct the other quadrature. Here we demonstrate such a nearly perfect phase-sensitive measurement using a cavity optomechanical scheme, characterized by an extremely small noise less than 0.2 quanta. The device also strongly squeezes microwave radiation by 8 dB below vacuum. A source of bright squeezed microwaves opens up applications in manipulations of quantum systems, and noiseless amplification can be used even at modest cryogenic temperatures.
Microscopic systems exhibit many intriguing quantum mechanical phenomena which cannot be explained by classical physics. Quantum mechanics has succesfully explained the behaviour of subatomic particles, atoms, and electromagnetic waves where entanglement, wave-particle duality and superposition of particles has been observed. In macroscopic scales, quantum mechanics explains the microscopic origin of electronic properties of solids, and quantum coherence effects are routinely observed in superfluids and superconductors. However, most macroscopic objects behave according to the laws of classical physics due to decoherence effects caused by interaction with the environment. Mechanical systems are ideal for studying quantum behavior of macroscopic objects as they can be measured with high accuracy, and their interaction with the environment can be controlled. Cavity optomechanics studies the interaction between light and mechanical objects through radiation pressure force. Recent developments in the field have made it possible to study quantum behaviour in macroscopic mechanical objects. For example, mechanical oscillators coupled to either microwave or optical light have been cooled to their quantum ground state. This thesis studies a cavity optomechanical system in which micromechanical aluminium membrane resonator is coupled to a superconducting microwave circuit resonator. This work focuses on the phenomena relating to the Heisenberg's uncertainty principle which sets a fundamental limit to the precision in which certain pairs of properties of a system can be measured. Due to uncertainty principle, even if a harmonic oscillator is cooled to the ground state, it still has random motion called the zero-point motion. This sets a fundamental limit on how accurately one can measure the motion of the resonator. In a squeezed quantum state, fluctuations of a quantity can be reduced below this quantum limit, at the cost of increased fluctuations in the pair variable. In this work, motion of a nearly macroscopic object is measured in a squeezed state. Due to uncertainty principle, a measurement amplifying an oscillatory signal always adds noise. However, when information in one part of the signal is lost, one can amplify and measure the other part perfectly. This kind of nearly noiseless phase-sensitive measurement, and squeezing of microwave fields is demonstrated in this work. An optomechanical device that simultaneously performs high-gain amplification and frequency conversion is created. Collective dynamics of a multimode optomechanical system is studied. When measuring the oscillator position continuously, the system is perturbed by the measuring. This can be avoided in quantum back-action evading measurement, which is demonstrated for collective motion of two mechanical resonators. Finally, an entanglement of centre-of-mass motion of two nearly macroscopic objects is created and stabilised.
High-gain and low-noise signal amplification is a valuable tool in various cryogenic microwave experiments. A microwave optomechanical device, in which a vibrating capacitor modulates the frequency of a microwave cavity, is one technique that is able to amplify microwave signals with high gain and large dynamical range. Such optomechanical amplifiers typically rely on strong backaction of microwave photons on the mechanical mode achieved in the sideband-resolved limit of optomechanics. Here, we observe microwave amplification in an optomechanical cavity in the extremely unresolved sideband limit. A large gain is observed for any detuning of the single pump tone within the cavity linewidth, a clear indication that the amplification is not induced by dynamical backaction. By being able to amplify for any detuning of the pump signal, the amplification center frequency can be tuned over the entire range of the broad cavity linewidth. Additionally, by providing microwave amplification without mechanical amplification, we predict that by using this scheme it is possible to achieve near-quantum-limited microwave amplification despite a large thermal occupation of the mechanical mode.
High-gain amplifiers of electromagnetic signals operating near the quantum limit are crucial for quantum information systems and ultrasensitive quantum measurements.However, the existing techniques have a limited gain-bandwidth product and only operate with weak input signals.Here, we demonstrate a two-port optomechanical scheme for amplification and routing of microwave signals, a system that simultaneously performs high-gain amplification and frequency conversion in the quantum regime.Our amplifier, implemented in a two-cavity microwave optomechanical device, shows 41 dB of gain and has a high dynamic range, handling input signals up to 10 13 photons per second, 3 orders of magnitude more than corresponding Josephson parametric amplifiers.We show that although the active medium, the mechanical resonator, is at a high temperature far from the quantum limit, only 4.6 quanta of noise is added to the input signal.Our method can be readily applied to a wide variety of optomechanical systems, including hybrid optical-microwave systems, creating a universal hub for signals at the quantum level.
Under a strong quantum measurement, the motion of an oscillator is disturbed by the measurement backaction, as required by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. When a mechanical oscillator is continuously monitored via an electromagnetic cavity, as in a cavity optomechanical measurement, the backaction is manifest by the shot noise of incoming photons that becomes imprinted onto the motion of the oscillator. Following the photons leaving the cavity, the correlations appear as squeezing of quantum noise in the emitted field. Here we observe such "ponderomotive" squeezing in the microwave domain using an electromechanical device made out of a superconducting resonator and a drumhead mechanical oscillator. Under a strong measurement, the emitted field develops complex-valued quantum correlations, which in general are not completely accessible by standard homodyne measurements. We recover these hidden correlations, using a phase-sensitive measurement scheme employing two local oscillators. The utilization of hidden correlations presents a step forward in the detection of weak forces, as it allows us to fully utilize the quantum noise reduction under the conditions of strong force sensitivity.
We investigate the nonlinear interaction between a squeezed cavity mode and a mechanical mode in an optomechanical system (OMS) that allows us to selectively obtain either a radiation-pressure coupling or a parametric-amplification process. The squeezing of the cavity mode can enhance the interaction strength into the single-photon strong-coupling regime, even when the OMS is originally in the weak-coupling regime. Moreover, the noise of the squeezed mode can be suppressed completely by introducing a broadband-squeezed vacuum environment that is phase matched with the parametric amplification that squeezes the cavity mode. This proposal offers an alternative approach to control the OMS using a squeezed cavity mode, which should allow single-photon quantum processes to be implemented with currently available optomechanical technology. Potential applications range from engineering single-photon sources to nonclassical phonon states.
Phase-sensitive amplification in a three-level atomic system exhibits interesting features. For example, in the zero-detuning limit and for sufficiently strong driving field, this system becomes an ideal parametric amplifier, whereas, for a weak driving field it is a phase-insensitive amplifier [Ansari et al., Phys. Rev. A 41, 5179 (1990)]. In this paper, we show that this system could be used to measure the quantum state of the radiation field inside a cavity. To reconstruct the quantum state, we amplify it through a three-level atomic system and in the parametric limit, when noise in both the quadratures approaches to zero measure the amplified field quadrature. The complete quadrature distribution is obtained by measuring the quadratures for different values of the driving field phases. The inverse Radon transformation is then employed to reconstruct the original quantum state. Our scheme is insensitive to the problems associated with nonunit detector efficiency in homodyne detection measurement.