No Arabic abstract
Optomechanical systems typically use light to control the quantum state of a mechanical resonator. In this paper, we propose a scheme for controlling the quantum state of light using the mechanical degree of freedom as a controlled beam splitter. Preparing the mechanical resonator in non-classical states enables an optomechanical Stern-Gerlach interferometer. When the mechanical resonator has a small coherent amplitude it acts as a quantum control, entangling the optical and mechanical degrees of freedom. As the coherent amplitude of the resonator increases, we recover single photon and two-photon interference via a classically controlled beam splitter. The visibility of the two-photon interference is particularly sensitive to coherent excitations in the mechanical resonator and this could form the basis of an optically transduced weak-force sensor.
We introduce an optomechanical scheme for the probabilistic preparation of single-phonon Fock states of mechanical modes based on photo-subtraction. The quality of the produced mechanical state is confirmed by a number of indicators, including phonon statistics and conditional fidelity. We assess the detrimental effect of parameters such as the temperature of the mechanical system and address the feasibility of the scheme with state-of-the-art technology.
The recent maturation of hybrid quantum devices has led to significant enhancements in the functionality of a wide variety of quantum systems. In particular, harnessing mechanical resonators for manipulation and control has expanded the use of two-level systems in quantum information science and quantum sensing. In this letter, we report on a monolithic hybrid quantum device in which strain fields associated with resonant vibrations of a diamond cantilever dynamically control the optical transitions of a single nitrogen-vacancy (NV) defect center in diamond. We quantitatively characterize the strain coupling to the orbital states of the NV center, and with mechanical driving, we observe NV-strain couplings exceeding 10 GHz. Furthermore, we use this strain-mediated coupling to match the frequency and polarization dependence of the zero-phonon lines of two spatially separated and initially distinguishable NV centers. The experiments demonstrated here mark an important step toward engineering a quantum device capable of realizing and probing the dynamics of non-classical states of mechanical resonators, spin-systems, and photons.
This papers purpose is to review the results recently obtained in the Quantum Optics labs of the National Institute of Metrological Research (INRIM) in the field of single- and few-photon detectors calibration, from both the classical and quantum viewpoint. In the first part of the paper is presented the calibration of a single-photon detector with absolute methods, while in the second part we focus on photon-number-resolving detectors, discussing both the classical and quantum characterization of such devices.
Continuous weak measurement allows localizing open quantum systems in state space, and tracing out their quantum trajectory as they evolve in time. Efficient quantum measurement schemes have previously enabled recording quantum trajectories of microwave photon and qubit states. We apply these concepts to a macroscopic mechanical resonator, and follow the quantum trajectory of its motional state conditioned on a continuous optical measurement record. Starting with a thermal mixture, we eventually obtain coherent states of 78% purity--comparable to a displaced thermal state of occupation 0.14. We introduce a retrodictive measurement protocol to directly verify state purity along the trajectory, and furthermore observe state collapse and decoherence. This opens the door to measurement-based creation of advanced quantum states, and potential tests of gravitational decoherence models.
Boson sampling is a specific quantum computation, which is likely hard to implement efficiently on a classical computer. The task is to sample the output photon number distribution of a linear optical interferometric network, which is fed with single-photon Fock state inputs. A question that has been asked is if the sampling problems associated with any other input quantum states of light (other than the Fock states) to a linear optical network and suitable output detection strategies are also of similar computational complexity as boson sampling. We consider the states that differ from the Fock states by a displacement operation, namely the displaced Fock states and the photon-added coherent states. It is easy to show that the sampling problem associated with displaced single-photon Fock states and a displaced photon number detection scheme is in the same complexity class as boson sampling for all values of displacement. On the other hand, we show that the sampling problem associated with single-photon-added coherent states and the same displaced photon number detection scheme demonstrates a computational complexity transition. It transitions from being just as hard as boson sampling when the input coherent amplitudes are sufficiently small, to a classically simulatable problem in the limit of large coherent amplitudes.