Speaker: Tobias Kippenberg, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL)
The ability to manipulate mechanical oscillators in a regime where their interaction with laser light needs to be described by quantum mechanics, requires to satisfy the dichotomy of a very well isolated mechanical oscillators from the environment, while necessitating coupling to an auxiliary degree of freedom for quantum control. First discovered in the field of gravitational wave detection, ‘loss dilution’ has enabled more than 3-orders of magnitude improvement of mechanical coherence, enabling numerous advanced in extending quantum control to mechanical systems. Showing examples of room temperature ultra coherent density modulated membranes, and superconducting micro-mechanical optomechanical systems, experiments are described that attain pondermotive squeezing at room temperature. Similarly, ground state cooling of a collective mode is described, as well as experiments that record the decoherence of a squeezed mechanical oscillator.
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