Quantum Nano Optomechanics
(QNAO)
Start date: Apr 1, 2010,
End date: Mar 31, 2013
PROJECT
FINISHED
"The applicant has been recruited as a Chargé de Recherche for CNRS and will start soon at the Institut Néel (Grenoble, France) his own research activities. The Marie Curie Reintegration Grant will help him start his independent research career and support his installation at the Institute. The goal of the project is to extend the thematic of cavity optomechanics down to the nanoscale and observe the quantum first signatures with hybrid systems constituted of nanomechanical oscillators and single emitters. From their higher mechanical susceptibility, nano-resonators can facilitate the access to the quantum regime of radiation pressure and allow observing the week coupling to a single emitter. Those systems are also interesting candidates for opening links towards solid state physics at the condition to be able to detect and control their Brownian motion. The project will consist in developing an ultrasensitive nearfield sensor of the nanomotion. To do so the nano-mechanical oscillator will be approached in the evanescent tail of a high-Q optical microcavity, rendering its optical resonances sensitive to its position fluctuation. This approach allows to overpass the diffraction limit inherent to the use of light fields with sub-wavelength objects, while still benefiting from the ultrasensitive readout capacity offered by low noise laser sources. Various kinds of exotic resonators could then be studied, in particular suspended graphene membranes, nanotubes, and micropilars or photonic crystal cavities embedding single emitters. The second part of the project aims at studying the coupling of a nano-resonator to a single emitter (quantum dots / color center in diamond nano-crystals), a system that can be seen as a macroscopic trapped ion, and observes the first quantum signatures of this hybrid quantum system."
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