Single-photon opto-mechanics in the strong coupling regime

U Akram,G J Milburn,M Aspelmeyer,N Kiesel

doi:10.1088/1367-2630/12/8/083030

Abstract

We give a theoretical description of a coherently driven opto-mechanical system with a single added photon. The photon source is modeled as a cavity that initially contains one photon and that is irreversibly coupled to the opto-mechanical system. We show that the probability for the additional photon to be emitted by the opto-mechanical cavity will exhibit oscillations under a Lorentzian envelope, when the driven interaction with the mechanical resonator is strong enough. Our scheme provides a feasible route towards quantum state transfer between optical photons and micromechanical resonators.

Highlights

Almost all previous investigations in opto-mechanics have presupposed conventional optical sources, well described by statistical mixtures of coherent states
We describe the interaction through a linearized treatment that is expanded around the steady state field amplitude in the cavity, which would arise in the absence of the opto-mechanical interaction
The calculation we have presented is based on a linearization of the intensity-dependent force acting on the mechanical element, around a strong coherent steady state field inside the cavity

Summary

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This article has been downloaded from IOPscience. Please scroll down to see the full text article. 2010 New J. For g we recover the statistics of the cavity decay as no significant opto-mechanical coupling takes place Increasing g such that κ < g < we observe revivals in the detection probability, which arise because the single-photon excitation is exchanged coherently between the optomechanical cavity and the mechanical resonator. It might be noted that the photon number and phonon number oscillations are not π out of phase in the first phase of the evolution, as one might expect if the cavity was started with exactly one photon at t = 0 For short times, this is due to the dynamics of the single-photon source excitation of the cavity, on top of the photon–phonon interactions: the dynamics in equation (9) depends explicitly on the correlations between the source and the opto-mechanical cavity, ac† + a†c.

Fock state in the source cavity n

Discussion and conclusion