Analog curved spacetimes in the reversed dissipation regime of cavity optomechanics

TL;DR

This paper proposes a theoretical scheme in cavity optomechanics to simulate photon fluid propagation in curved spacetime, using models that leverage the reversed dissipation regime to control effective photon interactions and metric properties.

Contribution

It introduces two models for 2D photon gases in optomechanical systems and demonstrates how to simulate curved spacetime physics through controllable photon fluid dynamics.

Findings

Photon phase fluctuations obey the Klein-Gordon equation in curved spacetime.

Effective Kerr-type photon interactions are achieved via adiabatic elimination in RDR.

Photon fluid metrics can be manipulated by system parameters.

Abstract

In this paper, we theoretically propose an optomechanical scheme to explore the possibility of simulating the propagation of the collective excitations of the photon fluid in a curved spacetime. For this purpose, we introduce two theoretical models for two-dimensional photon gas in a planar optomechanical microcavity and a two-dimensional array of coupled optomechanical systems. In the reversed dissipation regime (RDR) of cavity optomechanics where the mechanical oscillator reaches equilibrium with its thermal reservoir much faster than the cavity modes, the mechanical degrees of freedom can adiabatically be eliminated. The adiabatic elimination of the mechanical mode provides an effective nonlinear Kerr-type photon-photon interaction. Using the nonlinear Schr\"{o}dinger equation (NLSE), we show that the phase fluctuations in the two-dimensional photon fluid obey the Klein-Gordon equation for a massless scalar field propagating in a curved spacetime. The results reveal that the photon fluid as well as the corresponding metric can be controlled by manipulating the system parameters.