Entangling the ro-vibrational modes of a macroscopic mirror using radiation pressure

TL;DR

This paper theoretically demonstrates that radiation pressure can entangle vibrational and rotational modes of a macroscopic mirror in an optical cavity, offering a novel way to study quantum effects in macroscopic objects.

Contribution

It introduces a method to entangle different degrees of freedom of a macroscopic mirror using radiation pressure, with tunable coupling ratios for experimental robustness.

Findings

Radiation pressure can generate bipartite entanglement between vibrational and rotational modes.

The coupling ratio can be adjusted experimentally, enhancing robustness.

First proposal to entangle two different degrees of freedom of a macroscopic object.

Abstract

We consider the dynamics of a vibrating and rotating end-mirror of an optical Fabry-P{\'erot} cavity that can sustain Laguerre-Gaussian modes. We demonstrate theoretically that since the intra-cavity field carries linear as well as angular momentum, radiation pressure can create bipartite entanglement between a vibrational and a rotational mode of the mirror. Further we show that the ratio of vibrational and rotational couplings with the radiation field can easily be adjusted experimentally, which makes the generation and detection of entanglement robust to uncertainties in the cavity manufacture. This constitutes the first proposal to demonstrate entanglement between two qualitatively different degrees of freedom of the same macroscopic object.