2011/10/31 by Ting Hong, Huan Yang, H. Miao +2 · 37 citations
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Classical mechanics #Force Microscopy Techniques and Applications #Interferometry #Mechanical and Optical Resonators #Michelson interferometer #Optics #Photon #Photonic and Optical Devices #Physics #Quantum #Quantum decoherence #Quantum mechanics #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.88.023812
published in Physical Review A 88(2) (American Physical Society) · 14 pages and 9 figures. Comments are welcome
arxiv created 2012/05/04 · openalex publication_date 2013/08/08 · arxiv updated 2013/08/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We study the quantum dynamics of a Michelson interferometer with Fabry-Perot cavity arms and one movable end mirror, and driven by a single photon---an optomechanical device previously studied by Marshall et al. as a device that searches for gravity decoherence. We obtain an exact analytical solution for the system's quantum mechanical equations of motion, including details about the exchange of the single photon between the cavity mode and the external continuum. The resulting time evolution of the interferometer's fringe visibility displays interesting new features when the incoming photon's frequency uncertainty is narrower or comparable to the cavity's line width---only in the limiting case of much broader-band photon does the result return to that of Marshall et al., but in this case the photon is not very likely to enter the cavity and interact with the mirror, making the experiment less efficient and more susceptible to imperfections. In addition, we show that in the strong-coupling regime, by engineering the incoming photon's wave function, it is possible to prepare the movable mirror into an arbitrary quantum state of a multidimensional Hilbert space.