Optomechanics articles within Nature Physics

Featured

  • Article |

    Achieving low decoherence is challenging in hybrid quantum systems. A superconducting-circuit-based optomechanical platform realizes millisecond-scale quantum state lifetime, which allows tracking of the free evolution of a squeezed mechanical state.

    • Amir Youssefi
    • , Shingo Kono
    •  & Tobias J. Kippenberg

  • Research Briefing |

    A coherent interface between a mechanical oscillator and superconducting electrical circuits would enable the control of quantum states of mechanical motion, but such interfaces often result in excess mechanical energy loss. A new material-agnostic approach is shown to achieve strong electromechanical coupling while preserving a long phonon lifetime.

  • News & Views |

    Levitated nanoparticles can now be cooled to the motional ground state in two dimensions. This advance could enable a new generation of macroscopic quantum experiments.

    • Dalziel J. Wilson

  • News & Views |

    Solitary waves — solitons — occur in a wide range of physical systems with a broad array of attributes and applications. Carefully engineered light–matter interactions have now produced an optomechanical dissipative soliton with promising properties.

    • Alessia Pasquazi

  • News & Views |

    Integrating quantum technology with existing telecom infrastructure is hampered by a mismatch in operating frequencies. An optomechanical resonator now offers a strain-mediated spin–photon interface for long-distance quantum networks.

    • Lilian Childress
    •  & Jack Sankey

  • News & Views |

    Polaritons are hybrid states of light and matter that occur in a wide range of physical platforms. When a nanosphere is levitated inside an optical cavity, light can hybridize with the motion on a plane rather than along an axis, resulting in ‘vectorial’ polaritons.

    • Tania S. Monteiro

  • News & Views |

    A Cooper-pair box qubit is used to squeeze the energy of a heavy oscillating membrane towards a quantum energy eigenstate, bringing measurements of how mass and quantum mechanics interact one step closer.

    • Mario Gely
    •  & Gary A. Steele

  • Article |

    Analogous to the radiation-pressure coupling known in optomechanics, photon-pressure interaction between superconducting circuits can reach the strong coupling regime, which allows flexible control of the electromagnetic resonator’s quantum state.

    • D. Bothner
    • , I. C. Rodrigues
    •  & G. A. Steele

  • Article |

    An optomechanical cavity comprising a re-entrant cavity and membrane resonators can be tuned in and out of the Casimir regime. At the transition between the two regimes, the mechanical resonators exhibit a change in stiffness—the Casimir spring.

    • J. M. Pate
    • , M. Goryachev
    •  & M. E. Tobar

  • News & Views |

    Light can be coupled to sound via Brillouin scattering, but realizing an efficient interaction isn’t trivial. A new type of resonator succeeds in doing so in a macroscopic device — boasting features that better its nanoscale counterparts.

    • Jeremy Bourhill
    •  & Michael E. Tobar

  • Article |

    Optomechanical coupling to macroscopic phonon modes of a bulk acoustic-wave resonator is demonstrated, providing access to high acoustics quality factors for phononic modes at high frequencies that are robust to decoherence.

    • W. H. Renninger
    • , P. Kharel
    •  & P. T. Rakich

  • Commentary |

    The two-way symmetry of electromagnetic wave propagation can be broken effectively in optomechanical systems, enabling new devices that route photons in unconventional ways.

    • Ewold Verhagen
    •  & Andrea Alù

  • Article |

    An optomechanical system made of an optical cavity filled with superfluid liquid helium provides the means to study phenomena involving different degrees of freedom than those in traditional solid-state resonators.

    • A. D. Kashkanova
    • , A. B. Shkarin
    •  & J. G. E. Harris

  • News & Views |

    Going around an exceptional point in a full circle can be a non-adiabatic, asymmetric process. This surprising prediction is now confirmed by two separate experiments.

    • Dieter Heiss

  • News & Views |

    Owing to the extreme sensitivity of a microscopic cantilever to optical forces, it is possible to uncover the fine structure of optical momenta and associated mechanical effects in evanescent fields.

    • Etienne Brasselet

  • News & Views |

    Radiation pressure noise from squeezed light constrains the precision of sensing devices such as improved gravitational wave interferometers.

    • James S. Bennett
    •  & Warwick P. Bowen

  • News & Views |

    Cooling the motion of mechanical resonators to the ground state and subsequent advances in cavity optomechanics have been made possible by resolved-sideband cooling — an atomic-physics-inspired technique — first demonstrated in a 2008 Nature Physics paper.

    • Ania Bleszynski Jayich

  • News & Views |

    A tiny drum converts between infrared and microwave signals with record efficiency by keeping the beat of both.

    • Mankei Tsang

  • Article |

    An optomechanical system that converts microwaves to optical frequency light and vice versa is demonstrated. The technique achieves a conversion efficiency of approximately 10%. The results indicate that the device could work at the quantum level, up- and down-converting individual photons, if it were cooled to millikelvin temperatures. It could, therefore, form an integral part of quantum-processor networks.

    • R. W. Andrews
    • , R. W. Peterson
    •  & K. W. Lehnert

  • Article |

    A room-temperature motion sensor with record sensitivity is created using a levitating silica nanoparticle. Feedback cooling to reduce the noise arising from Brownian motion enables a detector that is perhaps even sensitive enough to detect non-Newtonian gravity-like forces.

    • Jan Gieseler
    • , Lukas Novotny
    •  & Romain Quidant

  • Letter |

    A nanomechanical interface between optical photons and microwave electrical signals is now demonstrated. Coherent transfer between microwave and optical fields is achieved by parametric electro-optical coupling in a piezoelectric optomechanical crystal, and this on-chip technology could form the basis of photonic networks of superconducting quantum bits.

    • Joerg Bochmann
    • , Amit Vainsencher
    •  & Andrew N. Cleland

Browse broader subjects

Browse Optomechanics across other nature.com journals