Optomechanical Generation of a photonic Bose-Einstein Condensate

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel method to achieve photon Bose-Einstein condensation using optomechanical interactions within a microscopic optical cavity, enabling thermalization and coherent radiation generation.

Contribution

It introduces a new approach to thermalize a photon gas via nanomechanical oscillators, differing from dye molecule methods, and explores quantum degenerate regimes.

Findings

Photon Bose-Einstein condensation can be achieved through optomechanical interactions.

Nanomechanical cavity converts broadband light into coherent radiation.

The cavity design suppresses photon loss, maintaining photon number.

Abstract

We propose to thermalize a low-dimensional photon gas and obtain photon Bose-Einstein condensation by optomechanical interactions in a microscopic optical cavity, with a single longitudinal mode and many transverse modes. The geometry of the short cavity is such that it provides a low-frequency cutoff at a photon energy far above the thermal energy, so that thermal emission of photons is suppressed and the photon number is conserved. While previous experiments on photon Bose-Einstein condensation have used dye molecules for photon gas thermalization, we here investigate thermalization owing to interactions with thermally fluctuating nanomechanical oscillators forming the cavity mirrors. In the quantum degenerate regime, the nanomechanical cavity converts broadband optical radiation into tuneable coherent radiation.