Proposal for entangling remote micromechanical oscillators via optical measurements

TL;DR

This paper proposes an experiment to entangle remote mechanical oscillators using optomechanical interferometry, optical measurements, and quantum state verification, with feasible parameters indicating millisecond entanglement lifetimes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel experimental scheme for entangling remote mechanical oscillators via optical measurement and erasure of which-path information.

Findings

Entanglement can be generated between remote mechanical oscillators.

The proposed setup is feasible with weak optomechanical coupling.

Entangled states could last on the order of milliseconds.

Abstract

We propose an experiment to create and verify entanglement between remote mechanical objects by use of an optomechanical interferometer. Two optical cavities, each coupled to a separate mechanical oscillator, are coherently driven such that the oscillators are laser cooled to the quantum regime. The entanglement is induced by optical measurement and comes about by combining the output from the two cavities to erase which-path information. It can be verified through measurements of degrees of second-order coherence of the optical output field. The experiment is feasible in the regime of weak optomechanical coupling. Realistic parameters for the membrane-in-the-middle geometry suggest entangled state lifetimes on the order of milliseconds.