15 research outputs found
Tunable phonon blockade in weakly nonlinear coupled mechanical resonators via Coulomb interaction
Realizing quantum mechanical behavior in micro- and nanomechanical resonators
has attracted continuous research effort. One of the ways for observing quantum
nature of mechanical objects is via the mechanism of phonon blockade. Here, we
show that phonon blockade could be achieved in a system of two weakly nonlinear
mechanical resonators coupled by a Coulomb interaction. The optimal blockade
arises as a result of the destructive quantum interference between paths
leading to two-phonon excitation. It is observed that, in comparison to a
single drive applied on one mechanical resonator, driving both the resonators
can be beneficial in many aspects; such as, in terms of the temperature
sensitivity of phonon blockade and also with regard to the tunability, by
controlling the amplitude and the phase of the second drive externally. We also
show that via a radiation pressure induced coupling in an optomechanical
cavity, phonon correlations can be measured indirectly in terms of photon
correlations of the cavity mode
Hybrid photon-phonon blockade
We describe a novel type of blockade in a hybrid mode generated by linear
coupling of photonic and phononic modes. We refer to this effect as hybrid
photon-phonon blockade and show how it can be generated and detected in a
driven nonlinear optomechanical superconducting system. Thus, we study
boson-number correlations in the photon, phonon, and hybrid modes in linearly
coupled microwave and mechanical resonators with a superconducting qubit
inserted in one of them. We find such system parameters for which we observe
eight types of different combinations of either blockade or tunnelling effects
(defined via the sub- and super-Poissonian statistics) for photons, phonons,
and hybrid bosons. In particular, we find that the hybrid photon-phonon
blockade can be generated by mixing the photonic and phononic modes which do
not exhibit blockade.Comment: 20 pages, 14 figure