Dispersive optomechanics: a membrane inside a cavity

By A. Jayich, J. Sankey, B. Zwickl, Cheng Yang, Jeff D. Thompson, Steven M. Girvin, A. Clerk, Florian Marquardt, J. Harris. 2008

346 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present the results of theoretical and experimental studies of dispersively coupled (or ‘membrane in the middle’) optomechanical systems. We calculate the linear optical properties of a high finesse cavity containing a thin dielectric membrane. We focus on the cavity's transmission, reflection and finesse as a function of the membrane's position along the cavity axis and as a function of its optical loss. We compare these calculations with measurements and find excellent agreement in cavities with empty-cavity finesses in the range 104–105. The imaginary part of the membrane's index of refraction is found to be ∼10−4. We calculate the laser cooling performance of this system, with a particular focus on the less-intuitive regime in which photons ‘tunnel’ through the membrane on a timescale comparable to the membrane's period of oscillation. Lastly, we present calculations of quantum non-demolition measurements of the membrane's phonon number in the low signal-to-noise regime where the phonon lifetime is comparable to the QND readout time.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fd312d58bfb9269f7bf24933934de3f2a77b9191

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Citations in the corpus

Strong and tunable nonlinear optomechanical coupling in a low-loss system (2010, background): “This combination will also enable other functionalities related to quadratic coupling, including dispersive QND readout of the intracavity photon number, two-phonon laser cooling, conditional squeezing between the reflected light and the membrane’s motion, and various types of passive optical squeez”
Ultralow-Noise SiN Trampoline Resonators for Sensing and Optomechanics (2015, methodology): “A transfer matrix theory [28] assuming zero optical loss in the membrane (red curve, zero free parameters) reproduces the oscillations.”
Introduction to quantum noise, measurement, and amplification (2008, background): “…in nanomechanics include the possibility of detecting quantum jumps in the state of a mechanical resonator via QND measurement of its energy (Jayich et al., 2008; Santamore et al., 2004a,b; Thompson et al., 2008), as well as the possibility of making backaction evading measurements (cf. Sec.”