Nonequilibrium dressing in a cavity with a movable reflecting mirror

TL;DR

This paper investigates the nonequilibrium dynamical process by which a movable mirror in a cavity becomes dressed through quantum interactions with a scalar field, leading to a stationary local equilibrium state.

Contribution

It introduces a quantum-mechanical model of a movable mirror interacting with a scalar field, extending to two-cavity systems and analyzing the dynamical dressing process.

Findings

The system reaches a stationary dressed state after evolution from a nonequilibrium initial condition.

The effective Hamiltonian is generalized to include two cavities sharing the mirror.

The dynamical process of dressing involves the mirror-field interaction leading to local equilibrium.

Abstract

We consider a movable mirror coupled to a one-dimensional massless scalar field in a cavity. Both the field and the mirror's mechanical degrees of freedom are described quantum-mechanically, and they can interact each other via the radiation pressure operator. We investigate the dynamical evolution of mirror and field starting from a nonequilibrium initial state, and their local interaction which brings the system to a stationary configuration for long times. This allows us to study the time-dependent dressing process of the movable mirror interacting with the field, and its dynamics leading to a local equilibrium dressed configuration. Also, in order to explore the effect of the radiation pressure on both sides of the movable mirror, we generalize the effective field-mirror Hamiltonian and previous results to the case of two cavities sharing the same mobile boundary. This leads us to address, in the appropriate limit, the dynamical dressing problem of a single mobile wall, bounded by a harmonic potential, in the vacuum space.