Strong dispersive coupling of a high-finesse cavity to a micromechanical membrane

By Jeff D. Thompson, B. Zwickl, A. Jayich, Florian Marquardt, Steven M. Girvin, J. Harris. Nature, 2007

1,150 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Macroscopic mechanical objects and electromagnetic degrees of freedom can couple to each other through radiation pressure. Optomechanical systems in which this coupling is sufficiently strong are predicted to show quantum effects and are a topic of considerable interest. Devices in this regime would offer new types of control over the quantum state of both light and matter, and would provide a new arena in which to explore the boundary between quantum and classical physics. Experiments so far have achieved sufficient optomechanical coupling to laser-cool mechanical devices, but have not yet reached the quantum regime. The outstanding technical challenge in this field is integrating sensitive micromechanical elements (which must be small, light and flexible) into high-finesse cavities (which are typically rigid and massive) without compromising the mechanical or optical properties of either. A second, and more fundamental, challenge is to read out the mechanical element’s energy eigenstate. Displacement measurements (no matter how sensitive) cannot determine an oscillator’s energy eigenstate, and measurements coupling to quantities other than displacement have been difficult to realize in practice. Here we present an optomechanical system that has the potential to resolve both of these challenges. We demonstrate a cavity which is detuned by the motion of a 50-nm-thick dielectric membrane placed between two macroscopic, rigid, high-finesse mirrors. This approach segregates optical and mechanical functionality to physically distinct structures and avoids compromising either. It also allows for direct measurement of the square of the membrane’s displacement, and thus in principle the membrane’s energy eigenstate. We estimate that it should be practical to use this scheme to observe quantum jumps of a mechanical system, an important goal in the field of quantum measurement.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/60bde1ee480af9d63579de6fa14beb6f642ce51e

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Citations in the corpus

Dispersive optomechanics: a membrane inside a cavity (2008, methodology): “Recently, a new type of optomechanical system has been described in which the mechanical degree-of-freedom is a flexible, partially transparent object (such as a dielectric membrane) placed inside a Fabry–Perot cavity [19]–[24].”
Strong and tunable nonlinear optomechanical coupling in a low-loss system (2010, background): “Assuming the crossing is of the usual hyperbolic form ω(x) = ± √ (ω′x)2 + ω2 s , where ω ′ is the slope of ω(x) far from the crossing and 2ωs is the gap at the degeneracy point, the data in the inset indicate ω′′ & 30 MHz/nm(2), which is three orders of magnitude greater than previously demonstrated”
The optomechanical instability in the quantum regime (2008, background): “Cooling to the mechanical ground-state will generate the opportunity to observe a variety of quantum effects in such systems, including ‘cat’ states [34], entanglement [35, 36] and Fock state detection [11, 37].”