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arXiv:2006.06699 · Physical Review Research

Mechanical oscillator thermometry in the nonlinear optomechanical regime

Víctor Montenegro, Marco G. Genoni, Abolfazl Bayat, M. G. A. Paris

Published Dec 8, 2020• 37 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

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 optomechanical system via non-Gaussian radiation-pressure interaction.To measure the temperature of the mechanical oscillator, initially in a thermal state, we use light as a probe to coherently interact with it and create an entangled state.We show that the optical probe gets a nonlinear phase, resulting from the non-Gaussian interaction, and undergoes an incoherent phase diffusion process.To efficiently infer the temperature from the entangled light-matter state, we propose using a nonlinear Kerr medium before a homodyne detector.Remarkably, placing the Kerr medium enhances the precision to nearly saturate the ultimate quantum bound given by the quantum Fisher information.Furthermore, it also simplifies the thermometry procedure as it makes the choice of the homodyne local phase independent of the temperature.

DOI
10.1103/physrevresearch.2.043338

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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 optomechanical system via non-Gaussian radiation-pressure interaction.To measure the temperature of the mechanical oscillator, initially in a thermal state, we use light as a probe to coherently interact with it and create an entangled state.We show that the optical probe gets a nonlinear phase, resulting from the non-Gaussian interaction, and undergoes an incoherent phase diffusion process.To efficiently infer the temperature from the entangled light-matter state, we propose using a nonlinear Kerr medium before a homodyne detector.Remarkably, placing the Kerr medium enhances the precision to nearly saturate the ultimate quantum bound given by the quantum Fisher information.Furthermore, it also simplifies the thermometry procedure as it makes the choice of the homodyne local phase independent of the temperature.
We present a way of measuring with high precision the anharmonicity of a quantum oscillator coupled to an optical field via radiation pressure. Our protocol uses a sequence of pulsed interactions to perform a loop in the phase space of the mechanical oscillator, which is prepared in a thermal state. We show how the optical field acquires a phase depending on the anharmonicity. Remarkably, one only needs small initial cooling of the mechanical motion to probe even small anharmonicities. Finally, by applying tools from quantum estimation theory, we calculate the ultimate bound on the estimation precision posed by quantum mechanics and compare it with the precision obtainable with feasible measurements such as homodyne and heterodyne detection on the cavity field. In particular we demonstrate that homodyne detection is nearly optimal in the limit of a large number of photons of the field and we discuss the estimation precision of small anharmonicities in terms of its signal-to-noise ratio.
In a nutshell, a cavity optomechanical system consists of a mechanical oscillator inside an optical cavity. Cavity optomechanics studies the interplay between the light-matter radiation-pressure interaction and the change in the cavity frequency induced by mechanical motion. By leveraging the tools of quantum optics and quantum measurement, cavity quantum optomechanics enables the engineering of nonclassical quantum states of bulk matter. In this thesis, I present protocols for engineering such nonclassical quantum states in Part II. First, I introduce a scheme to ‘grow’ a quantum kitten state of a mechanical oscillator into a macroscopic Schrödinger cat state using a series of nonlinear pulsed optomechanical interactions. Next, I detail our proposed schemes to generate and verify entanglement between two mechanical oscillators. Moving on from pulsed optomechanics, I describe the theory behind an experiment that achieved multi-phonon subtraction from a mechanical oscillator in a continuously driven Brillouin optomechanical system. In the final chapter of Part II, I provide a theoretical preview of an experiment that investigates the behaviour of the mechanical oscillator when no light is detected at the output. In Part III, I introduce a new framework for nonlinear cavity quantum optomechanics that incorporates the intrinsic nonlinearity of the radiation-pressure interaction, the nonlinearity from the cavity enhancement, and higher-order mechanical position terms in the expansion of the cavity frequency. I then propose a scheme for measuring mechanical position using general-dyne detection, applicable to pulsed and continuous measurements. This predicts a new regime of operation, the “stochastic Gaussian” regime. Finally, I discuss a protocol for deterministic mechanical squeezing that utilizes the cavity response.
Why are classical theories often sufficient to describe the physics of our world even though everything around us is entirely composed of microscopic quantum systems? The boundary between these two fundamentally dissimilar theories remains an unsolved problem in modern physics. Position measurements of small objects allow us to probe the area where the classical approximation breaks down. In quantum mechanics, Heisenbergâ s uncertainty principle dictates that any measurement of the position must be accompanied by measurement induced back-action---in this case manifested as an uncertainty in the momentum. In recent years, cavity optomechanics has become a powerful tool to perform precise position measurements and investigate their fundamental limitations. The utilization of optical micro-cavities greatly enhances the interaction between light and state-of-the-art nanomechanical oscillators. Therefore, quantum mechanical phenomena have been successfully observed in systems far beyond the microscopic world. In such a cavity optomechanical system, the fluctuations in the position of the oscillator are transduced onto the phase of the light, while fluctuations in the amplitude of the light disturb the momentum of the oscillator during the measurement. As a consequence, correlations are established between the amplitude and phase quadrature of the probe light. However, so far, observation of quantum effects has been limited exclusively to cryogenic experiments, and access to the quantum regime at room temperature has remained an elusive goal because the overwhelming amount of thermal motion masks the weak quantum effects. This thesis describes the engineering of a high-performance cavity optomechanical device and presents experimental results showing, for the first time, the broadband effects of quantum back-action at room temperature. The device strongly couples mechanical and optical modes of exceptionally high quality factors to provide a measurement sensitivity ∼ ⁣104\sim\!10^4∼104 times below the requirement to resolve the zero-point fluctuations of the mechanical oscillator. The quantum back-action is then observed through the correlations created between the probe light and the motion of the nanomechanical oscillator. A so-called â variational measurementâ , which detects the transmitted light in a homodyne detector tuned close to the amplitude quadrature, resolves the quantum noise due to these correlations at the level of 10\% of the thermal noise over more than an octave of Fourier frequencies around mechanical resonance. Moreover, building on this result, an additional experiment demonstrates the ability to achieve quantum enhanced metrology. In this case, the generated quantum correlations are used to cancel quantum noise in the measurement record, which then leads to an improved relative signal-to-noise ratio in measurements of an external force. In conclusion, the successful observation of broadband quantum behavior on a macroscopic object at room temperature is an important milestone in the field of cavity optomechanics. Specifically, this result heralds the rise of optomechanical systems as a platform for quantum physics at room temperature and shows promise for generation of ponderomotive squeezing in room-temperature interferometers.
The challenge of developing high-precision temperature sensors is an important issue that has recently received a lot of attention. In this work, we introduce an estimation technique to precisely measure the temperature of a quantum reservoir using a Kerr-nonlinear resonator with drive. Thermalization in our suggested protocol is assessed using Uhlmann-Jozsa fidelity, and then we utilize quantum Fisher information to evaluate the metrological potential of our thermometry scheme. We observe that increasing the Kerr nonlinearity coefficient and driving amplitude significantly enhances precision in the temperature estimation. Furthermore, we also explore the underlying physical mechanisms by analyzing probe purity in the steady state and evaluating the performance of homodyne versus heterodyne detection methods. Our results demonstrate that neither of these Gaussian measurements is optimal; instead, optimal homodyne detection always surpasses heterodyne detection.
Cavity quantum optomechanics has emerged as a new platform for quantum science and technology and has applications ranging from quantum-information processing to tests of the foundations of physics. Of crucial importance for optomechanics is the generation and verification of non-Gaussian states of motion and a key outstanding challenge is the observation of a canonical two-mode Schrodinger-cat state in the displacement of two mechanical oscillators. In this work, we introduce a protocol that utilizes the nonlinearity of the radiation-pressure interaction combined with photon-counting measurements to generate this bipartite non-Gaussian mechanical state. Our protocol employs short optical pulses to both generate the mechanical quantum state, and to then measure arbitrary mechanical quadrature moments, which we utilize to verify the non-Gaussian entanglement. Our entanglement-verification procedure can be used to evaluate an entire class of inseparability criteria and also provides a route for experimental characterisation of a broad range of single- and multi-partite mechanical states. Key experimental factors, such as optical loss and mechanical decoherence, are carefully analyzed and we show that the scheme is feasible with only minor improvements to current experiments that operate outside the resolved-sideband regime. Our scheme provides a new avenue for quantum experiments with entangled mechanical oscillators and offers significant potential for further research and development that utilizes such non-Gaussian states for quantum-information and sensing applications, and for studying the quantum-to-classical transition.
We present a proposal to prepare the macroscopic superposition states of a mechanical oscillator in an optomechanical system with quadratic coupling. By coherently driving the optomechanical cavity with an external field, a Kerr-type interaction among phonons is induced. The macroscopic mechanical superposition can be generated by exploiting the Kerr nonlinearity in the mechanical oscillator, just as the generation of a nonclassical state of light in a Kerr medium. One merit of our proposal is that the Kerr nonlinearity can be strongly enhanced by adjusting the amplitude of the driving field. The influence of the system damping on the realization of mechanical non-Gaussian state is discussed by the negativity of the Wigner function. The results show that the macroscopic superposition states are robust against the mechanical thermal noise.