Simon Groeblacher, California Institute of Technology
Abstract
Mechanical resonators have recently drawn significant attention for their potential in becoming a new species of quantum systems. Such devices are a textbook example for a classical harmonic oscillator, while at the same time being at the forefront of a number of classical applications including high-resolution sensing. However, bringing such mechanical resonators into the quantum domain will allow for fundamentally new applications – with potential applications ranging from experiments on the foundations of quantum physics (e.g. creating macroscopic superpositions of massive objects), to their potential as a quantum bus between different quantum systems in quantum information processing.
A particularly successful approach for realizing quantum states in macroscopic mechanical systems is cavity (quantum) opto-mechanics, where mechanical oscillators are coupled via radiation pressure forces inside an optical cavity to a laser field. These experiments offer a fundamentally new way of achieving light-matter interaction on the micro- and nanoscale and so far the underlying physical mechanisms have been demonstrated in a variety of proof-of-principle demonstrations.
We would like to discuss some of the most recent experiments that lead to the demonstration of ground-state cooling of optomechanical devices, as well as an experiment using the radiation pressure back action to generate squeezed light. We will show how these first results could lead to more complex quantum experiments with truly macroscopic mechanical systems. In addition, we would like to highlight a possible route to extend the research field to an entirely new regime: increasing the optomechanical interaction strength to a level where single-photon interactions with the mechanical motion become dominant. In such a regime it would be possible to explore the full non- linear character of the interaction.