No Arabic abstract
We propose and experimentally demonstrate a technique for coupling phonons out of an optomechanical crystal cavity. By designing a perturbation that breaks a symmetry in the elastic structure, we selectively induce phonon leakage without affecting the optical properties. It is shown experimentally via cryogenic measurements that the proposed cavity perturbation causes loss of phonons into mechanical waves on the surface of silicon, while leaving photon lifetimes unaffected. This demonstrates that phonon leakage can be engineered in on-chip optomechanical systems. We experimentally observe large fluctuations in leakage rates that we attribute to fabrication disorder and verify this using simulations. Our technique opens the way to engineering more complex on-chip phonon networks utilizing guided mechanical waves to connect quantum systems.
State of the art nanomechanical resonators present quality factors Q ~ 10^3 - 10^5, which are much lower than those that can be naively extrapolated from the behavior of micromechanical resonators. We analyze the dissipation mechanism that arises in nanomechanical beam-structures due to the tunneling of mesoscopic phonons between the beam and its supports (known as clamping losses). We derive the environmental force spectral density that determines the quantum Brownian motion of a given resonance. Our treatment is valid for low frequencies and provides the leading contribution in the aspect ratio. This yields fundamental limits for the Q-values which are described by simple scaling laws and are relevant for state of the art experimental structures. In this context, for resonant frequencies in the 0.1-1GHz range, while this dissipation mechanism can limit flexural resonators it is found to be negligible for torsional ones. In the case of structureless 3D supports the corresponding environmental spectral densities are Ohmic for flexural resonators and super-Ohmic for torsional ones, while for 2D slab supports they yield 1/f noise. Furthermore analogous results are established for the case of suspended semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes. Finally, we provide a general expression for the spectral density that allows to extend our treatment to other geometries and illustrate its use by applying it to a microtoroid. Our analysis is relevant for applications in high precision measurements and for the prospects of probing quantum effects in a macroscopic mechanical degree of freedom.
An experimental demonstration of a non-classical state of a nanomechanical resonator is still an outstanding task. In this paper we show how the resonator can be cooled and driven into a squeezed state by a bichromatic microwave coupling to a charge qubit. The stationary oscillator state exhibits a reduced noise in one of the quadrature components by a factor of 0.5 - 0.2. These values are obtained for a 100 MHz resonator with a Q-value of 10$^4$ to 10$^5$ and for support temperatures of T $approx$ 25 mK. We show that the coupling to the charge qubit can also be used to detect the squeezed state via measurements of the excited state population. Furthermore, by extending this measurement procedure a complete quantum state tomography of the resonator state can be performed. This provides a universal tool to detect a large variety of different states and to prove the quantum nature of a nanomechanical oscillator.
We report on nanomechanical resonators with very high-quality factors operated as mechanical probes in liquid helium (^4mathrm{He}), with special attention to the superfluid regime down to millikelvin temperatures. Such resonators have been used to map out the full range of damping mechanisms in the liquid on the nanometer scale from (10,mathrm{mK}) up to (sim3,mathrm{K}). The high sensitivity of these doubly-clamped beams to thermal excitations in the superfluid (^4mathrm{He}) makes it possible to drive them using the momentum transfer from phonons generated by a nearby heater. This so-called textit{phonon wind} is an inverse thermomechanical effect that until now has never been demonstrated, and provides the possibility to perform a new type of optomechanical experiments in quantum fluids.
Spin-mechanics studies interactions between spin systems and mechanical vibrations in a nanomechanical resonator and explores their potential applications in quantum information processing. In this tutorial, we summarize various types of spin-mechanical resonators and discuss both the cavity-QED-like and the trapped-ion-like spin-mechanical coupling processes. The implementation of these processes using negatively charged nitrogen vacancy and silicon vacancy centers in diamond is reviewed. Prospects for reaching the full quantum regime of spin-mechanics, in which quantum control can occur at the level of both single spin and single phonon, are discussed with an emphasis on the crucial role of strain coupling to the orbital degrees of freedom of the defect centers.
The observation of quantized nanomechanical oscillations by detecting femtometer-scale displacements is a significant challenge for experimentalists. We propose that phonon blockade can serve as a signature of quantum behavior in nanomechanical resonators. In analogy to photon blockade and Coulomb blockade for electrons, the main idea for phonon blockade is that the second phonon cannot be excited when there is one phonon in the nonlinear oscillator. To realize phonon blockade, a superconducting quantum two-level system is coupled to the nanomechanical resonator and is used to induce the phonon self-interaction. Using Monte Carlo simulations, the dynamics of the induced nonlinear oscillator is studied via the Cahill-Glauber $s$-parametrized quasiprobability distributions. We show how the oscillation of the resonator can occur in the quantum regime and demonstrate how the phonon blockade can be observed with currently accessible experimental parameters.