Cavity Optomechanical Sensing and Manipulation of an Atomic Persistent Current

Optomechanical Schrödinger cat states in a cavity Bose-Einstein condensate

“…In summary, by using the unique properties of BEC-based COM systems, we have shown how to create cat states of mechanical vibrations with distinguishable superposition components, how to make use of this cat state to generate and manipulate mechanical quadrature squeezing, and how to achieve multicomponent optical cat states as well, which are otherwise difficult to be attainable in solid-state COM systems. These findings open up a new way to explore the nonclassical nature of massive objects by utilizing diverse BEC gases such as annular BEC [33], spinor BEC [32,40], multi-component BEC [41,42] and molecular Fermi-BEC [43], in which photons and phonons would experience different types of light-motion interaction. Moreover, in a broader view, the ability to reach the ultrastrong light-motion coupling regime would also make the BEC-based COM systems a promising platform to engineer a variety of nonlinear COM effects, such as solitons, optical multistable oscillating [35], and phonon lasing.…”

“…These results, as an example to achieve specific macroscopic quantum state, provide an efficient way to investigate the nonclassical nature of massive objects, facilitating the exploration of various ultrastrongcoupling-enabled quantum effects, such as photon or phonon blockade [38], and quantum phase transition [39]. Moreover, apart from the one-dimensional BEC-based COM system, our work can also be realized with other types of BEC gases, e.g., annular BEC [33], spinor BEC [32,40], multi-component BEC [41,42] and molecular Fermi-BEC [43]. As such, we believe that our proposed scheme is poised to serve in fundamental tests of quantum theories, provide key quantum resources to emerging quantum technologies, and function as promising platforms to investigate the coherent light-motion interactions.…”

“…So far, cat states have been demonstrated and ma-based COM system that consists of a high-finesse Fabry-Perot cavity and an optically trapped one-dimensional BEC, unveiling its unique properties that are otherwise unattainable within the solid-state COM devices. We note that the BEC-based COM systems have already been extensively studied in experiments [27][28][29][30][31], providing a promising platform for not only achieving nonclassical states of macroscopic objects, but also investigating many kinds of nonlinear COM effects such as mechanical ground-state cooling [29], quantum simulating [32,33], quantum-state transfer [34], and multistable oscillating [35]. A recent advance closely related to our study is, for example, the exploration of a role reversal BEC-based COM system by Zhang et al [36], in which they analyzed several nonclassical states of the atomic matter-wave field, and particularly an atomic cat state.…”