We study the dynamics of an optical mode in a cavity with a movable mirror subject to quantum Brownian motion. We study the phase-noise power spectrum of the output light, and we describe the mirror Brownian motion, which is responsible for the thermal-noise contribution, using the quantum Langevin approach. We show that the standard quantum Langevin equations, supplemented with the appropriate non-Markovian correlation functions, provide an adequate description of Brownian motion.
We perform a quantum theoretical calculation of the noise power spectrum for a phase measurement of the light output from a coherently driven optical cavity with a freely moving rear mirror. We examine how the noise resulting from the quantum back action appears among the various contributions from other noise sources. We do not assume an ideal (homodyne) phase measurement, but rather consider phase-modulation detection, which we show has a different shot noise level. We also take into account the effects of thermal damping of the mirror, losses within the cavity, and classical laser noise. We relate our theoretical results to experimental parameters, so as to make direct comparisons with current experiments simple. We also show that in this situation, the standard Brownian motion master equation is inadequate for describing the thermal damping of the mirror, as it produces a spurious term in the steady-state phase-fluctuation spectrum. The corrected Brownian motion master equation [L. Diosi, Europhys. Lett. 22, 1 (1993)] rectifies this inadequacy.
Quantum optomechanics (QOM) explores the interaction between a quantum field, often confined in a cavity, and the quantum motion of mirrors, membranes or material media, usually assumed slow enough with negligible particle production, which is the central concern of dynamical Casimir effects, and a drive laser field for effective control. This rapidly developing field has a wide range of applications, from quantum sensing to the detection of gravitational waves. Because the opto-mechanical coupling is nonlinear, most theoretical investigations assume that the amplitude of mirror motion
x remains small. Recent years saw several papers treating
x2,x3 orders in the mirror displacement. In our work we take a different route, deploying the functional perturbative method presented in [1] and enriched in [2], applicable for sufficiently weak opto-mechanical couplings. With this we can treat arbitrary displacement of the mirror, not just at a higher order in a power series expansion in
x. We first derive the influence action of the quantum field and its non-Markovian noises back-reacting on the moving mirror with self-consistency. From it we derive a nonlinear Langevin equation driven by these back-action noises from the quantum field. We then show how results from our general modeling and treatment can be linked with the models and the Langevin equations presented in the literature, starting with the popular radiation pressure
Nx coupling, with
N the photon number, up to the recent
x3 order results. We hope this new approach and the results presented here can provide useful theoretical support for high precision QOM experimentation in the future.
According to quantum mechanics, if we keep observing a continuous variable we generally disturb its evolution. For a class of observables, however, it is possible to implement a so-called quantum nondemolition measurement: by confining the perturbation to the conjugate variable, the observable is estimated with arbitrary accuracy, or prepared in a well-known state. For instance, when the light bounces on a movable mirror, its intensity is not perturbed (the effect is just seen on the phase of the radiation), but the radiation pressure allows one to trace back its fluctuations by observing the mirror motion. In this work, we implement a cavity optomechanical experiment based on an oscillating micromirror, and we measure correlations between the output light intensity fluctuations and the mirror motion. We demonstrate that the uncertainty of the former is reduced below the shot-noise level determined by the corpuscular nature of light.
We address an experimental scheme to analyze the optical bistability and the entanglement of two movable mirrors coupled to a two-mode laser inside a doubly resonant cavity. With this aim we investigate the master equations of the atom-cavity subsystem in conjunction with the quantum Langevin equations that describe the interaction of the mirror cavity. The parametric amplification-type coupling induced by the two-photon coherence on the optical bistability of the intracavity mean photon numbers is found and investigated. Under this condition, the optical intensities exhibit bistability for all large values of cavity laser detuning. We also provide numerical evidence for the generation of strong entanglement between the movable mirrors and show that it is robust against environmental thermalization.
We report two schemes of generating squeezed state of the mirror motion in a dissipative optome-chanical system, where feeding a broadband squeezed-vacuum light and periodically modulating the driving field, respectively. In the first scheme, we find that the driven cavity field can effectively perform as a squeezed-vacuum reservoir for the movable mirror via utilizing the completely destructive interference of quantum noise when the mirror is weakly coupled to the cavity mode. In the second scheme, both the numerical and analytical results predict that the squeezed state of the mirror motion around its ground state is achievable, and the obtained squeezed state is robust against the thermal noise because of the strong cooling effect outside the resolved-sideband regime, which also arises from the destructive interference of quantum noise.