Cavity Quantum Opto-mechanics: A Brief Review

The interaction between a movable mirror and the radiation field of an optical cavity has recently been the subject of extensive theoretical and experimental investigations. This field known as cavity opto-mechanics has played a vital role in the conceptual exploration of the boundaries between classical and quantum mechanical systems. These opto-mechanical systems couple the mechanical motion to an optical field directly via radiation pressure buildup in a cavity. The coupling of mechanical and optical degrees of freedomvia radiation pressure has been a subject of early research in the context of laser cooling[1, 2, 3] and gravitational-wave detectors[4]. The recent improvements in nanofabrication techniques suggest that in the near future, these devices will reach the regime in which their sensitivitywill be limited by the ultimate quantumlimits set by the Heisenberg principle. The importance of the limits imposed by quantum mechanics on the resonator motion was first pointed out by Braginsky and coworkers[5] in the completely different context of massive resonators employed in the detection of gravitational waves[6]. However, in recent years, the quest for the experimental demonstration of genuine quantum states of macroscopic mechanical resonators has spread well beyond the gravitational wave physics community and has attracted wide interest.