Nonclassical microwave radiation from the parametric dynamical Casimir effect in the reversed-dissipation regime of circuit optomechanics

TL;DR

This paper proposes a feasible optomechanical system operating in the reversed dissipation regime that generates nonclassical microwave photons via the parametric dynamical Casimir effect, with controllable quantum features.

Contribution

It introduces a novel optomechanical setup in the reversed dissipation regime that combines the dynamical Casimir effect with Kerr nonlinearity to produce and control nonclassical microwave radiation.

Findings

Generation of Casimir photons with nonclassical features.

Kerr nonlinearity saturates photon number and induces oscillations.

Photons exhibit sub-Poissonian statistics, negative Wigner function, and squeezing.

Abstract

We propose an experimentally feasible optomechanical system (OMS) that is dispersively driven and operates in the reversed dissipation regime (RDR), where the mechanical damping rate far exceeds the cavity decay rate. We demonstrate that coherent, fast-time modulation of the driving laser frequency on time scales longer than the mechanical decoherence time allows for adiabatic elimination of the mechanical mode, resulting in strong parametric amplification of quantum vacuum fluctuations of the intracavity field. This mechanism, known as the parametric dynamical Casimir effect (parametric-DCE), leads to the generation of Casimir photons. In the dispersive RDR, we find that the total system Hamiltonian-including the DCE term-is intrinsically modified by a generalized optomechanical Kerr-type nonlinearity. This nonlinearity not only saturates the mean number of radiated Casimir photons on short time scales, even without dissipation, but also induces oscillatory behavior in their dynamics and quantum characteristics. Remarkably, the presence of the Kerr nonlinearity causes the generated DCE photons to exhibit nonclassical features, including simultaneous sub-Poissonian statistics and negative Wigner function, as well as quadrature squeezing, which can be controlled by adjusting the system parameters. Surprisingly, the controllable simultaneous nonclassical dynamics in the same physical parameter regime, which is induced by the optomechanical Kerr nonlinearity to the parametric DCE cannot occur in the standard DCE or Kerr-type systems. The proposed nonclassical microwave radiation source possesses the potential to be applied in quantum information processing, quantum computing as well as microwave quantum sensing.