AI Article Synopsis

  • Researchers have observed mechanical motion influenced by light at room temperature, overcoming challenges like low mechanical quality factors and noise in solid-state systems.
  • They developed a phononic-engineered membrane-in-the-middle system, achieving a 700-fold reduction in cavity frequency noise and a high quality factor of 180 million through soft-clamping techniques.
  • This advancement allows for improved displacement sensing and the preparation of thermal states in the oscillator, pushing the boundaries of quantum control in macroscopic solid-state resonators.

Article Abstract

At room temperature, mechanical motion driven by the quantum backaction of light has been observed only in pioneering experiments in which an optical restoring force controls the oscillator stiffness. For solid-state mechanical resonators in which oscillations are controlled by the material rigidity, the observation of these effects has been hindered by low mechanical quality factors, optical cavity frequency fluctuations, thermal intermodulation noise and photothermal instabilities. Here we overcome these challenges with a phononic-engineered membrane-in-the-middle system. By using phononic-crystal-patterned cavity mirrors, we reduce the cavity frequency noise by more than 700-fold. In this ultralow noise cavity, we insert a membrane resonator with high thermal conductance and a quality factor (Q) of 180 million, engineered using recently developed soft-clamping techniques. These advances enable the operation of the system within a factor of 2.5 of the Heisenberg limit for displacement sensing, leading to the squeezing of the probe laser by 1.09(1) dB below the vacuum fluctuations. Moreover, the long thermal decoherence time of the membrane oscillator (30 vibrational periods) enables us to prepare conditional displaced thermal states of motion with an occupation of 0.97(2) phonons using a multimode Kalman filter. Our work extends the quantum control of solid-state macroscopic oscillators to room temperature.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10866701PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06997-3DOI Listing

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