Back-action-evading measurements of nanomechanical motion

By J. Hertzberg, T. Rocheleau, T. Ndukum, Manolis Savva, A. Clerk, K. Schwab. 2009

230 citations recorded by the source corpus.

When carrying out ultrasensitive continuous measurements of position, one must ultimately confront the fundamental effects of detection back-action. Back-action forces set a lower bound on the uncertainty in the measured position, the ‘standard quantum limit’ (SQL). Recent measurements of nano- and micromechanical resonators are rapidly approaching this limit. Making measurements with sensitivities surpassing the SQL will require a new kind of approach: back-action-evading (BAE), quantum non-demolition measurement techniques. Here we realize a BAE measurement based on the parametric coupling between a nanomechanical and a microwave resonator. We demonstrate for the first time BAE detection of a single quadrature of motion with sensitivity four times the quantum zero-point motion of the mechanical resonator. We identify a limiting parametric instability inherent in BAE measurement, and describe how to improve the technique to surpass the SQL and permit the formation of squeezed states of motion.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/87cbe4d9a3dc14e4d3818eab57eff6c15d5b7595

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Introduction to quantum noise, measurement, and amplification (2008, methodology): “Backaction evasion using a microwave cavity detector coupled to a nanomechanical resonator was recently reported (Hertzberg et al., 2010).”
Mechanical systems in the quantum regime (2011, methodology): “Sideband cooling has been performed in a series of experiments [56,68,252].”