Optomechanical systems are rapidly becoming one of the most promising platforms for observing quantum behaviour, especially at the macroscopic level. Moreover, thanks to their state-of-the-art methods of fabrication, they may now enter regimes of non-linear interactions between their constituent mechanical and optical degrees of freedom. In this work, we show how this novel opportunity may serve to construct a new generation of optomechanical sensors. We consider the canonical optomechanical setup with the detection scheme being based on time-resolved counting of photons leaking from the cavity. By performing simulations and resorting to Bayesian inference, we demonstrate that the non-classical correlations of the detected photons may crucially enhance the sensor performance in real time. We believe that our work may stimulate a new direction in the design of such devices, while our methods apply also to other platforms exploiting non-linear light-matter interactions and photon detection.

We discuss several approaches to determine the Casimir force in inertial frames of reference in different dimensions. On an example of a simple model involving mirrors in Rindler spacetime we show that Casimir’s and Lifschitz’s methods are inequivalent and only the latter provides the correct force in other spacetime geometries. For conformally coupled fields we derive the Casimir force in conformally flat spacetimes utilizing an anomaly and provide explicit examples in the Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker (k = 0) models.

Optomechanical systems are rapidly becoming one of the most promising platforms for observing quantum behaviour, especially at the macroscopic level. Moreover, thanks to their state-of-the-art methods of fabrication, they may now enter regimes of non-linear interactions between their constituent mechanical and optical degrees of freedom. In this work, we show how this novel opportunity may serve to construct a new generation of optomechanical sensors. We consider the canonical optomechanical setup with the detection scheme being based on time-resolved counting of photons leaking from the cavity. By performing simulations and resorting to Bayesian inference, we demonstrate that the non-classical correlations of the detected photons may crucially enhance the sensor performance in real time. We believe that our work may stimulate a new direction in the design of such devices.