Quantum-coherent coupling of a mechanical oscillator to an optical cavity mode

By Ewold Verhagen, Samuel Deleglise, S. Weis, A. Schliesser, Tobias J. Kippenberg. Nature, 2011

765 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Optical laser fields have been widely used to achieve quantum control over the motional and internal degrees of freedom of atoms and ions, molecules and atomic gases. A route to controlling the quantum states of macroscopic mechanical oscillators in a similar fashion is to exploit the parametric coupling between optical and mechanical degrees of freedom through radiation pressure in suitably engineered optical cavities. If the optomechanical coupling is ‘quantum coherent’—that is, if the coherent coupling rate exceeds both the optical and the mechanical decoherence rate—quantum states are transferred from the optical field to the mechanical oscillator and vice versa. This transfer allows control of the mechanical oscillator state using the wide range of available quantum optical techniques. So far, however, quantum-coherent coupling of micromechanical oscillators has only been achieved using microwave fields at millikelvin temperatures. Optical experiments have not attained this regime owing to the large mechanical decoherence rates and the difficulty of overcoming optical dissipation. Here we achieve quantum-coherent coupling between optical photons and a micromechanical oscillator. Simultaneously, coupling to the cold photon bath cools the mechanical oscillator to an average occupancy of 1.7 ± 0.1 motional quanta. Excitation with weak classical light pulses reveals the exchange of energy between the optical light field and the micromechanical oscillator in the time domain at the level of less than one quantum on average. This optomechanical system establishes an efficient quantum interface between mechanical oscillators and optical photons, which can provide decoherence-free transport of quantum states through optical fibres. Our results offer a route towards the use of mechanical oscillators as quantum transducers or in microwave-to-optical quantum links.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/39c6d5980f1fe3cf29f6a46464c9ca3a2b3c6cfb

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Citations in the corpus

Probing Planck-scale physics with quantum optics (2011, background): “Significant experimental progress has been recently made towards this goal, including laser cooling of nano- and micromechanical devices into their quantum ground state (36,37), operation in the strong coupling regime (38–40) and coherent interactions (40, 41).”
Bidirectional and efficient conversion between microwave and optical light (2013, background): “This same interaction allows the mechanical resonator to serve as an information storage medium [30, 31], and opens up the possibility of high-fidelity frequency conversion [32– 36].”
Continuous mode cooling and phonon routers for phononic quantum networks (2012, background): “For example, in the context of quantum information processing and quantum communication, optomechanical (OM) slowing of light [21, 22] and first steps towards realizing a mechanical quantum memory [15, 16] have been demonstrated, and the use of mechanical quantum transducers for interfacing differen”