Macroscopic tunneling of a membrane in an optomechanical double-well potential

TL;DR

This paper explores the possibility of observing macroscopic quantum tunneling of an optomechanical membrane in a tunable double-well potential created by a quadratic cavity mode coupling, proposing a pulsed measurement scheme for verification.

Contribution

It introduces a method to generate tunable double-well potentials for membranes using quadratic optomechanical coupling and proposes a measurement scheme to observe macroscopic tunneling.

Findings

Double-well potentials can be engineered via quadratic coupling.

High Q-factor membranes enable potential observation of macroscopic tunneling.

A pulsed measurement scheme is proposed for experimental verification.

Abstract

The macroscopic tunneling of an optomechanical membrane is considered. A cavity mode which couples quadratically to the membranes position can create highly tunable adiabatic double-well potentials, which together with the high Q-factors of such membranes render the observation of macroscopic tunneling possible. A suitable, pulsed measurement scheme using a linearly coupled mode of the cavity for the verification of the effect is studied.