An optomechanical system consists of an optical cavity coupled to a mechanical oscillator. The system used for this work was a silica microsphere. In a silica microsphere, the optical cavity is formed by light that is confined by total internal reflection while circulating around the equator of the sphere. The mechanical oscillator is the mechanical breathing motion of the sphere itself. The optical cavity and mechanical oscillator are coupled by radiation pressure and by the mechanical oscillator physically changing the length of the optical cavity.
The optomechanical analog to electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT), known as optomechanically induced transparency (OMIT), has previously been studied in its steady state. One topic of this dissertation is an experimental study of OMIT in the time domain. The results of these experimental demonstrations continue comparisons between EIT and OMIT, while also building a foundation for optomechanical light storage.
In OMIT, an off-resonance control laser controls the interaction between on-resonance light and the mechanical oscillator. Optomechanical light storage makes use of this arrangement to store an optical signal as a mechanical excitation, which is then retrieved at a later time as an optical signal. This is done by using two temporally separated off-resonance control laser pulses. This technique is extremely flexible in frequency and displays a storage lifetime on the order of microseconds.
Use of optomechanical systems for quantum mechanical applications is hindered by the thermal background noise of the mechanical oscillator. Addressing this issue by first cooling the mechanical oscillator is costly and fraught with difficulties. The final topic presented in this dissertation deals with this issue through the use of an optomechanical dark mode. Two optical modes can interact with the same mechanical mode. The dark mode is a state that couples the two optical modes but is decoupled from the mechanical oscillator.
While our specific optomechanical system is limited by its somewhat modest optomechanical cooperativity, this conversion process can, in principle, preserve the quantum state of the signal, even at room temperature, opening the possibility for this technique to be applied in quantum information processing.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uoregon.edu/oai:scholarsbank.uoregon.edu:1794/19254 |
| Date | 18 August 2015 |
| Creators | Fiore, Victor |
| Contributors | Raymer, Michael |
| Publisher | University of Oregon |
| Source Sets | University of Oregon |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Rights | Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0-US |
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