No Arabic abstract
Energy dissipation is an unavoidable phenomenon of physical systems that are directly coupled to an external environmental bath. The ability to engineer the processes responsible for dissipation and coupling is fundamental to manipulate the state of such systems. This is particularly important in oscillatory states whose dynamic response is used for many applications, e.g. micro and nano-mechanical resonators or sensing and timing, qubits for quantum engineering, and vibrational modes for optomechanical devices. In situations where stable oscillations are required, the energy dissipated by the vibrational modes is usually compensated by replenishment from external energy sources. Consequently, if the external energy supply is removed, the amplitude of oscillations start to decay immediately, since there is no means to restitute the energy dissipated. Here, we demonstrate a novel strategy to maintain stable oscillations, i.e. with constant amplitude and frequency, without supplying external energy to compensate losses. The fundamental intrinsic mechanism of mode coupling is used to redistribute and store mechanical energy among vibrational modes and coherently transfer it back to the principal mode when the external excitation is off. To experimentally demonstrate this phenomenon that defies physical intuition, we exploit the nonlinear dynamic response of microelectromechanical (MEMS) oscillators to couple two different vibrational modes through an internal resonance. Since the underlying mechanism describing the fundamentals of this new phenomenon is generic and representative of a large variety of systems, the presented method provides a new dissipation engineering strategy that would enable a new generation of autonomous devices.
All physical systems are to some extent open and interacting with their environment. This insight, basic as it may seem, gives rise to the necessity of protecting quantum systems from decoherence in quantum technologies and is at the heart of the emergence of classical properties in quantum physics. The precise decoherence mechanisms, however, are often unknown for a given system. In this work, we make use of an opto-mechanical resonator to obtain key information about spectral densities of its condensed-matter heat bath. In sharp contrast to what is commonly assumed in high-temperature quantum Brownian motion describing the dynamics of the mechanical degree of freedom, based on a statistical analysis of the emitted light, it is shown that this spectral density is highly non-Ohmic, reflected by non-Markovian dynamics, which we quantify. We conclude by elaborating on further applications of opto-mechanical systems in open system identification.
Time-resolved scanning Kerr microscopy has been used to directly image the magnetization dynamics of nano-contact (NC) spin-torque vortex oscillators (STVOs) when phase-locked to an injected microwave (RF) current. The Kerr images reveal free layer magnetization dynamics that extend outside the NC footprint, where they cannot be detected electrically, but which are crucial to phase-lock STVOs that share common magnetic layers. For a single NC, dynamics were observed not only when the STVO frequency was fully locked to that of the RF current, but also for a partially locked state characterized by periodic changes in the core trajectory at the RF frequency. For a pair of NCs, images reveal the spatial character of dynamics that electrical measurements show to have enhanced amplitude and reduced linewidth. Insight gained from these images may improve understanding of the conditions required for mutual phase-locking of multiple STVOs, and hence enhanced microwave power emission.
Engineering nano-mechanical quantum systems possessing ultra-long motional coherence times allow for applications in ultra-sensitive quantum sensing, motional quantum memories and motional interfaces between other carriers of quantum information such as photons, quantum dots and superconducting systems. To achieve ultra-high motional Q one must work hard to remove all forms of motional noise and heating. We examine a magneto-nanomechanical quantum system that consists of a 3D arrangement of miniature superconducting loops which is stably levitated in a static inhomogenous magnetic field. The resulting motional Q is limited by the tiny decay of the supercurrent in the loops and may reach up to Q~10^(10). We examine the classical and quantum dynamics of the levitating superconducting system and prove that it is stably trapped and can achieve motional oscillation frequencies of several tens of MHz. By inductively coupling this levitating object to a nearby flux qubit we further show that by driving the qubit one can cool the motion of the levitated object and in the case of resonance, this can cool the vertical motion of the object close to its ground state.
Recent progress in observing and manipulating mechanical oscillators at quantum regime provides new opportunities of studying fundamental physics, for example, to search for low energy signatures of quantum gravity. For example, it was recently proposed that such devices can be used to test quantum gravity effects, by detecting the change in the [x,p] commutation relation that could result from quantum gravity corrections. We show that such a correction results in a dependence of a resonant frequency of a mechanical oscillator on its amplitude, which is known as amplitude-frequency effect. By implementing this new method we measure amplitude-frequency effect for 0.3 kg ultra high-Q sapphire split-bar mechanical resonator and for 10 mg quartz bulk acoustic wave resonator. Our experiments with sapphire resonator have established the upper limit on quantum gravity correction constant for $beta_0<5 times10^6$ which is a factor of 6 better than previously detected. The reasonable estimates of $beta_0$ from experiments with quartz resonators yield an even more stringent limit of $4times10^4$. The data sets of 1936 measurement of physical pendulum period by Atkinson results in significantly stronger limitations on $beta_0 ll 1$. Yet, due to the lack of proper pendulum frequency stability measurement in these experiments, the exact upper bound on $beta_0$ can not be reliably established. Moreover, pendulum based systems only allow testing a specific form of the modified commutator that depends on the mean value of momentum. The electro-mechanical oscillators to the contrary enable testing of any form of generalized uncertainty principle directly due to much higher stability and a higher degree of control.
We experimentally study the behavior of a parametrically pumped nonlinear oscillator, which is based on a superconducting lambda /4 resonator, and is terminated by a flux-tunable SQUID. We extract parameters for two devices. In particular, we study the effect of the nonlinearities in the system and compare to theory. The Duffing nonlinearity, alpha, is determined from the probe-power dependent frequency shift of the oscillator, and the nonlinearity, beta, related to the parametric flux pumping, is determined from the pump amplitude for the onset of parametric oscillations. Both nonlinearities depend on the parameters of the device and can be tuned in-situ by the applied dc flux. We also suggest how to cancel the effect of beta by adding a small dc flux and a pump tone at twice the pump frequency.