Single-photon induced instabilities in a cavity electromechanical device

Bera, T and Kandpal, M and Agarwal, GS and Singh, V (2024) Single-photon induced instabilities in a cavity electromechanical device. In: Nature Communications, 15 (1).

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Abstract

Cavity-electromechanical systems are extensively used for sensing and controlling the vibrations of mechanical resonators down to their quantum limit. The nonlinear radiation-pressure interaction in these systems could result in an unstable response of the mechanical resonator showing features such as frequency-combs, period-doubling bifurcations and chaos. However, due to weak light-matter interaction, typically these effects appear at very high driving strengths. By using polariton modes formed by a strongly coupled flux-tunable transmon and a microwave cavity, here we demonstrate an electromechanical device and achieve a single-photon coupling rate g0/2� of 160 kHz, which is nearly 4 of the mechanical frequency �m. Due to large g0/�m ratio, the device shows an unstable mechanical response resulting in frequency combs in sub-single photon limit. We systematically investigate the boundary of the unstable response and identify two important regimes governed by the optomechanical backaction and the nonlinearity of the electromagnetic mode. Such an improvement in the single-photon coupling rate and the observations of microwave frequency combs at single-photon levels may have applications in the quantum control of the motional states and critical parametric sensing. Our experiments strongly suggest the requirement of newer approaches to understand instabilities. © The Author(s) 2024.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Publication:	Nature Communications
Publisher:	Nature Research
Additional Information:	The copyright for this article belongs to the authors.
Keywords:	electromagnetic method; equipment; frequency analysis; nonlinearity; quantum mechanics, article; comb; microwave radiation; nonlinear system; photon; pressure; therapy; vibration
Department/Centre:	Division of Physical & Mathematical Sciences > Physics
Date Deposited:	10 Sep 2024 09:45
Last Modified:	10 Sep 2024 09:45
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/86067

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