Mechanical systems in the quantum regime

By Menno Poot, Herre S. J. van der Zant. 2011

425 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Mechanical systems are ideal candidates for studying quantum behavior of macroscopic objects. To this end, a mechanical resonator has to be cooled to its ground state and its position has to be measured with great accuracy. Currently, various routes to reach these goals are being explored. In this review, we discuss different techniques for sensitive position detection and we give an overview of the cooling techniques that are being employed. The latter includes sideband cooling and active feedback cooling. The basic concepts that are important when measuring on mechanical systems with high accuracy and/or at very low temperatures, such as thermal and quantum noise, linear response theory, and backaction, are explained. From this, the quantum limit on linear position detection is obtained and the sensitivities that have been achieved in recent opto- and nanoelectromechanical experiments are compared to this limit. The mechanical resonators that are used in the experiments range from meter-sized gravitational wave detectors to nanomechanical systems that can only be read out using mesoscopic devices such as single-electron transistors or superconducting quantum interference devices. A special class of nanomechanical systems is bottom-up fabricated carbon-based devices, which have very high frequencies and yet a large zero-point motion, making them ideal for reaching the quantum regime. The mechanics of some of the different mechanical systems at the nanoscale is studied. We conclude this review with an outlook of how state-of-the-art mechanical resonators can be improved to study quantum mechanics.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d46313d1c860201ceeb4989d7c71ceedb73821d2

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Neill Lambert
2. Clive Emary
3. O. Morsch
4. Vittorio Giovannetti
5. Franco Nori
6. Rosario Fazio
7. J. Sankey
8. M. Imboden

In Materials Chemistry

1. Franco Nori
2. Rosario Fazio
3. M. Imboden
4. P. Mohanty

Citations in the corpus

• Dissipation in nanoelectromechanical systems (2014, background): “Poot and van der Zant [46] give a extensive review quantum mechanical experiments with nanomechanical resonators.”
• Ultralow-Noise SiN Trampoline Resonators for Sensing and Optomechanics (2015, background): “Advances in nanofabrication over the past decades have enabled the growth and patterning of pristine materials, and the creation of mechanical sensors of extraordinary quality [1].”
• High-fidelity quantum driving (2011, background): “Quantum control may aim at reaching a given target state, as in the cooling of atomic ensembles [14] and nano-mechanical oscillators [15], or at tracking the instantaneous ground state of a system during its evolution as in adiabatic quantum computation [16].”
• Leggett–Garg inequalities (2013, background): “Nano-mechanical systems are mechanical oscillators fabricated on the nano-scale [165, 166].”