Optically induced phonon blockade in an optomechanical system with second-order nonlinearity

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to achieve phonon blockade in an optomechanical system using optically induced nonlinear interactions, enabling tunable quantum control of phonons for quantum technologies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to realize phonon blockade through optically induced nonlinearity, differing from traditional methods involving superconducting qubits.

Findings

Phonon blockade can be efficiently achieved with high cooperativity.

The effective nonlinear coupling is tunable via the external driving field.

The method is feasible with current high-quality mechanical systems.

Abstract

Quantum control of phonons has being become a focus of attention for developing quantum technologies. Here, we propose a proposal to realize phonon blockade in a quadratically coupled optomechanical system, where a strong nonlinear interaction between photons and phonons can be induced by an external field coherently driving the cavity, and the effective coupling strength is tunable by adjusting the amplitude of the driving field. This optically induced nonlinearity is different from standard methods for realization of phonon blockade, where the nonlinearity is achieved by coupling the mechanical system to superconducting qubits. We both analytically and numerically study the phonon statistical properties via the steady-state solution of the second-order correlation function, and find phonon blockade can be efficiently realized for a large cooperativity of the system, which is achievable based on the optically enhanced nonlinear coupling and high quality mechanical system.