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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics Pacific Rim (CLEO-PR)

Single- and Multi-Phonon Subtraction to a Mechanical Thermal State via Optomechanics

Andreas Ø. Svela, Georg Enzian, Lars Freisem, J. J. Price, J. Clarke, Biveen Shajilal, Jiří Janoušek, B. C. Buchler, Ping Koy Lam, Michael Ross Vanner

Published Jan 1, 2022• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

By heralding events of single- and multi-phonon subtraction to a mechanical thermal state in a Brillouin optomechanical system and using heterodyne tomography, we observe non-Gaussianity in the s-parameterised Wigner phase-space distribution.
DOI
10.1364/cleopr.2022.ctup7b_04

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A room-temperature mechanical oscillator undergoes thermal Brownian motion with an amplitude much larger than the amplitude associated with a single phonon of excitation. This motion can be read out and manipulated using laser light using a cavity-optomechanical approach. By performing a strong quantum measurement (i.e., counting single photons in the sidebands imparted on a laser), we herald the addition and subtraction of single phonons on the 300 K thermal motional state of a 4 GHz mechanical oscillator. To understand the resulting mechanical state, we implement a tomography scheme and observe highly non-Gaussian phase-space distributions. Using a maximum likelihood method, we infer the density matrix of the oscillator, and we confirm the counterintuitive doubling of the mean phonon number resulting from phonon addition and subtraction.
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We consider transfer of a highly nonclassical quantum state through an optomechanical system. That is we investigate a protocol consisting of sequential upload, storage and reading out of the quantum state from a mechanical mode of an optomechanical system. We show that provided the input state is in a test-bed single-photon Fock state, the Wigner function of the recovered state can have negative values at the origin, which is a manifest of nonclassicality of the quantum state of the macroscopic mechanical mode and the overall transfer protocol itself. Moreover, we prove that the recovered state is quantum non-Gaussian for wide range of setup parameters. We verify that current electromechanical and optomechanical experiments can test this complete transfer of single photon.