Observation of strong coupling between a micromechanical resonator and an optical cavity field

By S. Gröblacher, Klemens Hammerer, M. Vanner, Markus Aspelmeyer. Nature, 2009

843 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Achieving coherent quantum control over massive mechanical resonators is a current research goal. Nano- and micromechanical devices can be coupled to a variety of systems, for example to single electrons by electrostatic or magnetic coupling, and to photons by radiation pressure or optical dipole forces. So far, all such experiments have operated in a regime of weak coupling, in which reversible energy exchange between the mechanical device and its coupled partner is suppressed by fast decoherence of the individual systems to their local environments. Controlled quantum experiments are in principle not possible in such a regime, but instead require strong coupling. So far, this has been demonstrated only between microscopic quantum systems, such as atoms and photons (in the context of cavity quantum electrodynamics) or solid state qubits and photons. Strong coupling is an essential requirement for the preparation of mechanical quantum states, such as squeezed or entangled states, and also for using mechanical resonators in the context of quantum information processing, for example, as quantum transducers. Here we report the observation of optomechanical normal mode splitting, which provides unambiguous evidence for strong coupling of cavity photons to a mechanical resonator. This paves the way towards full quantum optical control of nano- and micromechanical devices.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8ca548a70341c9b383394191dea6dcf8ab143e2c

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In Artificial Intelligence

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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Citations in the corpus

Slowing and stopping light using an optomechanical crystal array (2010, neutral): “For weak driving (ΩmÀκ) the width of this band is 4Ω(2)m{κ, while for strong driving (ΩmÁκ) one recovers the “normal mode splitting” of width 2Ωm [26].”
Cavity magnonics (2021, background): “Gröblacher et al., 2009 report strong phonon-photon coupling at high photon intensities.”
Quantum-coherent coupling of a mechanical oscillator to an optical cavity mode (2011, background): “Optical experiments have not attained this regime owing to the large mechanical decoherence rate”