LABORATORI NAZIONALI DI LEGNARO
There is considerable interest in studying systems in which optical and mechanical degrees of freedom are coupled via radiation pressure. These opto-mechanical systems offer a promising architecture for controlling the quantum states of light and matter. The recent technological advances have made closer the achievement of this goal. One of these advances is the cooling of a macroscopic mechanical oscillator into its quantum ground state. However, many other quantum effects have yet to be observed, among these entanglement between the optical and mechanical degrees of freedom, quantum non demolition measurements of field quadratures and, eventually, ponderomotive squeezing that is our primary objective. The typical experiment consists of a high Finesse optical cavity and a mechanical resonator with high susceptibility and low mechanical losses. Very different approaches for the realization of this seemingly simple “recipe” can be found in literature, from Fabry-Pérot cavities with thin membranes inbetween to photonic crystal devices. In our case, the chosen system is a Fabry-Pérot cavity in which the end mirror is a silicon Micro-Opto-Mechanical (MOMs) resonator. During the talk I will describe the ongoing development of new resonators that has allowed us to obtain extremely high performances in terms of optical Finesse and mechanical losses. Then, I will focus on the experimental challenges that need to be faced in order to fully exploit these recent results.

DATA: 15-11-2012