The optomechanical instability in the quantum regime
By Max Ludwig, B. Kubala, Florian Marquardt. 2008
162 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We consider a generic optomechanical system, consisting of a driven optical cavity and a movable mirror attached to a cantilever. Systems of this kind (and analogues) have been realized in many recent experiments. It is well known that these systems can exhibit an instability towards a regime where the cantilever settles into self-sustained oscillations. In this paper, we briefly review the classical theory of the optomechanical instability, and then discuss the features arising in the quantum regime. We solve numerically a full quantum master equation for the coupled system, and use it to analyze the photon number, the cantilever's mechanical energy, the phonon probability distribution and the mechanical Wigner density, as a function of experimentally accessible control parameters. When a suitable dimensionless ‘quantum parameter’ is sent to zero, the results of the quantum mechanical model converge towards the classical predictions. We discuss this quantum-to-classical transition in some detail.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0dcd5582ac75ebb39fe4f3f091add7def88ccb6c
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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
Citations in the corpus
- Optomechanics of deformable optical cavities (2009, background): “as well as a description of optomechanical instability in the quantum regim”
- Mechanical systems in the quantum regime (2011, unknown): “[243–246].”