Observation of Radiation Pressure Shot Noise on a Macroscopic Object

Abstract

The quantum mechanics of position measurement of a macroscopic object is typically inaccessible because of strong coupling to the environment and classical noise. Here we monitor a mechanical resonator subject to an increasingly strong continuous position measurement and observe a quantum mechanical backaction force that rises in accordance with the Heisenberg uncertainty limit. For our optically-based position measurements, the backaction takes the form of a fluctuating radiation pressure from the Poisson-distributed photons in the coherent measurement field, termed radiation pressure shot noise. We demonstrate a backaction force that is comparable in magnitude to the thermal forces in our system. Additionally, we observe a temporal correlation between fluctuations in the radiation force and in the position of the resonator.

16 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (8)

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• Strong dispersive coupling of a high finesse cavity to a micromechanical membrane
• Quantum Theory of Cavity-Assisted Sideband Cooling of Mechanical Motion
• Theory of ground state cooling of a mechanical oscillator using dynamical back-action
• Cooling a nanomechanical resonator with quantum back-action
• Nanomechanical motion measured with precision beyond the standard quantum limit
• Probing optomechanical correlations between two optical beams down to the quantum level
• Observability of radiation pressure shot noise in optomechanical systems

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