Nonlinear Sideband Cooling to a Cat State of Motion

Abstract

The ability to prepare a macroscopic mechanical resonator into a quantum superposition state is an outstanding goal of cavity optomechanics. Here, we propose a technique to generate cat states of motion using the intrinsic nonlinearity of a dispersive optomechanical interaction. By applying a bichromatic drive to an optomechanical cavity, our protocol enhances the inherent second-order processes of the system, inducing the requisite two-phonon dissipation. We show that this nonlinear sideband cooling technique can dissipatively engineer a mechanical resonator into a cat state, which we verify using the full Hamiltonian and an adiabatically reduced model. While the fidelity of the cat state is maximized in the single-photon, strong-coupling regime, we demonstrate that Wigner negativity persists even for weak coupling. Finally, we show that our cat state generation protocol is robust to significant thermal decoherence of the mechanical mode, indicating that such a procedure may be feasible for near-term experimental systems.

6 pages, 4 figures with additional supplementary information (14 pages, 3 figures)

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Cited by in corpus (12)

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• Nonclassical mechanical states in cavity optomechanics in the single-photon strong-coupling regime
• Strong Intrinsic Longitudinal Coupling in Circuit Quantum Electrodynamics
• Multicomponent cat states with sub-Planckian structures and their optomechanical analogues
• Deterministic generation of nonclassical mechanical states in cavity optomechanics via reinforcement learning
• Catability as a metric for evaluating superposed coherent states
• Macroscopic distant magnon-mode entanglement via a squeezed drive
• Nano-assembled open quantum dot nanotube devices
• Transient dynamics of the quantum Stuart-Landau oscillator
• Quantum-enhanced learning with a controllable bosonic variational sensor network
• Tunable anharmonicity in cavity optomechanics in the unresolved sideband regime
• Reservoir-Engineered Mechanical Cat States with a Driven Qubit