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Science Advances

Measurement-based preparation of multimode mechanical states

Chao Meng, George A. Brawley, Soroush Khademi, Elizabeth M. Bridge, James S. Bennett, Warwick P. Bowen

Published May 27, 2022• 18 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Nanomechanical resonators are a key tool for future quantum technologies, such as quantum force sensors and interfaces, and for studies of macroscopic quantum physics. The ability to prepare room temperature nonclassical states is a major outstanding challenge. It has been suggested that this could be achieved using a fast continuous measurement to break the usual symmetry between position and momentum. Here, we demonstrate this symmetry breaking and use it to prepare a thermally squeezed mechanical state. Our experiments take advantage of collective measurements on multiple mechanical modes, which we show can increase the measurement speed and improve state preparation. Theoretically, we show that this result extends to the quantum regime, relaxing the requirements to generate nonclassical states. We predict that multimode conditioning can enable room temperature quantum squeezing with existing technology. Our work paves the way toward room temperature quantum nanomechanical devices and toward their application in quantum technology and fundamental science.

DOI
10.1126/sciadv.abm7585

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Nanomechanical resonators are a key tool for future quantum technologies, such as quantum force sensors and interfaces, and for studies of macroscopic quantum physics. The ability to prepare room temperature nonclassical states is a major outstanding challenge. It has been suggested that this could be achieved using a fast continuous measurement to break the usual symmetry between position and momentum. Here, we demonstrate this symmetry breaking and use it to prepare a thermally squeezed mechanical state. Our experiments take advantage of collective measurements on multiple mechanical modes, which we show can increase the measurement speed and improve state preparation. Theoretically, we show that this result extends to the quantum regime, relaxing the requirements to generate nonclassical states. We predict that multimode conditioning can enable room temperature quantum squeezing with existing technology. Our work paves the way toward room temperature quantum nanomechanical devices and toward their application in quantum technology and fundamental science.
Nanomechanical resonators are a key tool for future quantum technologies such as quantum force sensors and interfaces, and for studies of macroscopic quantum physics. The ability to prepare room temperature non-classical states is a major outstanding challenge. Here, we explore the use of measurement-based state conditioning to achieve this. We demonstrate conditional cooling of a nanomechanical resonator that has non-Markovian decoherence, and show theoretically that the non-Markovianity makes quantum squeezing significantly easier to achieve. We further show that collective measurement of multiple resonator modes improves the quality of state preparation. This allows us to achieve collective thermomechanical squeezing, in experiments that go beyond the validity of the rotating-wave approximation. Our modelling shows that non-Markovianity and multimode conditioning can both enable room temperature quantum squeezing with existing technology. Together, our results pave the way towards realising room temperature quantum nanomechanical devices and towards their application in quantum technology and fundamental science.
We revisit quantum state preparation of an oscillator by continuous linear position measurement. Quite general analytical expressions are derived for the conditioned state of the oscillator. Remarkably, we predict that quantum squeezing is possible outside of both the backaction dominated and quantum coherent oscillation regimes, relaxing experimental requirements even compared to ground-state cooling. This provides a new way to generate nonclassical states of macroscopic mechanical oscillators, and opens the door to quantum sensing and tests of quantum macroscopicity at room temperature.
Nonclassical states of nano- and micro-mechanical motion enable measurements beyond the standard quantum limit and constitute a key resource for quantum sensing and metrology. The most strongly squeezed mechanical states to date have been generated with electromechanical platforms under cryogenic refrigeration and using reservoir engineering. To push mechanical systems deeper into the quantum-squeezed regime requires protocols that increase the rate at which squeezing is generated to more strongly overcome the decoherence rate at which state purity is lost. Here, we squeeze the 800 kHz libration mode of a silica nanoparticle optically levitated in vacuum at room temperature. We expose our mechanical oscillator to an optically generated inverted potential, where the squeezing operation proceeds at an exponentially accelerated rate. We reach a squeezed quadrature variance 11 dB below the vacuum fluctuations within 250 ns. Our protocol establishes a new paradigm for generating quantum squeezing of mechanical motion and offers a platform for quantum-enhanced sensing with massive oscillators.
We investigate theoretically the conditions under which a multimode nanomechanical resonator, operated as a purely mechanical parametric oscillator, can be driven into highly nonclassical states. We find that when the device can be cooled to near its ground state, and certain mode matching conditions are satisfied, it is possible to prepare distinct resonator modes in quantum entangled states that violate Bell inequalities with homodyne quadrature measurements. We analyze the parameter regimes for such Bell inequality violations, and while experimentally challenging, we believe that the realization of such states lies within reach. This is a re-imagining of a quintessential quantum optics experiment by using phonons that represent tangible mechanical vibrations.
Abstract We explore the generation of nonclassical mechanical states by combining continuous measurement and feedback control. We find that feedback-induced spring softening can greatly enhance position squeezing, allowing squeezing despite measurement rates slower than the mechanical frequency. Conversely, even from a pure position measurement, we find that spring hardening can enable momentum squeezing, in a new regime we term the fast feedback regime. We interpret these effects as arising from correlations between the feedback drive and the measurement imprecision noise, which in turn effectively modify the measurement rates for position and momentum. Together, this significantly lowers the barrier to measurement-based preparation of nonclassical mechanical states at room temperature.
Quantum squeezing is an important resource in modern quantum technologies, such as quantum precision measurement and continuous-variable quantum information processing. The generation of squeezed states of mechanical modes is a significant task in cavity optomechanics. Motivated by recent interest in multimode optomechanics, it becomes an interesting topic to create quadrature squeezing in multiple mechanical resonators. However, in the multiple-degenerate-mechanical-mode optomechanical systems, the dark-mode effect strongly suppresses the quantum effects in mechanical modes. Here we study the generation of mechanical squeezing in a two-mechanical-mode optomechanical system by breaking the dark-mode effect with the synthetic-gauge-field method. We find that, when the mechanical modes work at a finite temperature, the mechanical squeezing is weak or even disappears due to the dark-mode effect, while the strong mechanical squeezing can be generated once the dark-mode effect is broken. In particular, the thermal-phonon-occupation tolerance of the mechanical squeezing is approximately three orders of magnitude larger than that without breaking the dark-mode effect. We also generalize this method to break the dark modes and to create the mechanical squeezing in multiple-mechanical-mode optomechanical systems. Our results describe a general physical mechanism and pave the way towards the generation of noise-resistant quantum resources.