No Arabic abstract
Over the past few decades, experimental tests of Bell-type inequalities have been at the forefront of understanding quantum mechanics and its implications. These strong bounds on specific measurements on a physical system originate from some of the most fundamental concepts of classical physics - in particular that properties of an object are well defined independent of measurements (realism) and only affected by local interactions (locality). The violation of these bounds unambiguously shows that the measured system does not behave classically, void of any assumption on the validity of quantum theory. It has also found applications in quantum technologies for certifying the suitability of devices for generating quantum randomness, distributing secret keys and for quantum computing. Here we report on the violation of a Bell inequality involving a massive, macroscopic mechanical system. We create light-matter entanglement between the vibrational motion of two silicon optomechanical oscillators, each comprising approx. $10^{10}$ atoms, and two optical modes. This state allows us to violate a Bell inequality by more than 4 standard deviations, directly confirming the non-classical behavior of our optomechanical system under the fair sampling assumption.
Quantum teleportation, the faithful transfer of an unknown input state onto a remote quantum system, is a key component in long distance quantum communication protocols and distributed quantum computing. At the same time, high frequency nano-optomechanical systems hold great promise as nodes in a future quantum network, operating on-chip at low-loss optical telecom wavelengths with long mechanical lifetimes. Recent demonstrations include entanglement between two resonators, a quantum memory and microwave to optics transduction. Despite these successes, quantum teleportation of an optical input state onto a long-lived optomechanical memory is an outstanding challenge. Here we demonstrate quantum teleportation of a polarization-encoded optical input state onto the joint state of a pair of nanomechanical resonators. Our protocol also allows for the first time to store and retrieve an arbitrary qubit state onto a dual-rail encoded optomechanical quantum memory. This work demonstrates the full functionality of a single quantum repeater node, and presents a key milestone towards applications of optomechanical systems as quantum network nodes.
Nano- and micromechanical solid-state quantum devices have become a focus of attention. Reliably generating nonclassical states of their motion is of interest both for addressing fundamental questions about macroscopic quantum phenomena and for developing quantum technologies in the domains of sensing and transduction. We used quantum optical control techniques to conditionally generate single-phonon Fock states of a nanomechanical resonator. We performed a Hanbury Brown and Twiss-type experiment that verified the nonclassical nature of the phonon state without requiring full state reconstruction. Our result establishes purely optical quantum control of a mechanical oscillator at the single-phonon level.
We demonstrate optomechanical interference in a multimode system, in which an optical mode couples to two mechanical modes. A phase-dependent excitation-coupling approach is developed, which enables the observation of constructive and destructive optomechanical interferences. The destructive interference prevents the coupling of the mechanical system to the optical mode, suppressing optically-induced mechanical damping. These studies establish optomechanical interference as an essential tool for controlling the interactions between light and mechanical oscillators.
Precision measurement of non-linear observables is an important goal in all facets of quantum optics. This allows measurement-based non-classical state preparation, which has been applied to great success in various physical systems, and provides a route for quantum information processing with otherwise linear interactions. In cavity optomechanics much progress has been made using linear interactions and measurement, but observation of non-linear mechanical degrees-of-freedom remains outstanding. Here we report the observation of displacement-squared thermal motion of a micro-mechanical resonator by exploiting the intrinsic non-linearity of the radiation pressure interaction. Using this measurement we generate bimodal mechanical states of motion with separations and feature sizes well below 100~pm. Future improvements to this approach will allow the preparation of quantum superposition states, which can be used to experimentally explore collapse models of the wavefunction and the potential for mechanical-resonator-based quantum information and metrology applications.
We propose to manipulate the statistic properties of the photons transport nonreciprocally via quadratic optomechanical coupling. We present a scheme to generate quadratic optomechanical interactions in the normal optical modes of a whispering-gallery-mode (WGM) optomechanical system by eliminating the linear optomechanical couplings via anticrossing of different modes. By optically pumping the WGM optomechanical system in one direction, the effective quadratic optomechanical coupling in that direction will be enhanced significantly, and nonreciprocal photon blockade will be observed consequently. Our proposal has potential applications for the on-chip nonreciprocal single-photon devices.