paper

Cavity Opto-Mechanics with a Bose-Einstein Condensate

arXiv:0807.2347 · doi:10.1126/science.1163218

Abstract

Cavity opto-mechanics studies the coupling between a mechanical oscillator and a cavity field, with the aim to shed light on the border between classical and quantum physics. Here we report on a cavity opto-mechanical system in which a collective density excitation of a Bose-Einstein condensate is shown to serve as the mechanical oscillator coupled to the cavity field. We observe that a few photons inside the ultrahigh-finesse cavity trigger a strongly driven back-action dynamics, in quantitative agreement with a cavity opto-mechanical model. With this experiment we approach the strong coupling regime of cavity opto-mechanics, where a single excitation of the mechanical oscillator significantly influences the cavity field. The work opens up new directions to investigate mechanical oscillators in the quantum regime and quantum gases with non-local coupling.

F.B. and S.R. contributed equally to this work. 6 pages, 4 figures

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