2019/02/28 by Wei Qin, Vincenzo Macrí, Vincenzo Macrì +3 · 2 citations
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Carbon Nanotubes in Composites #Casimir effect #Coupling (piping) #Mechanical and Optical Resonators #Mechanical resonance #Optics #Optomechanics #Oscillation (cell signaling) #Parametric oscillator #Parametric statistics #Photon #Physics #Quantum Electrodynamics and Casimir Effect #Quantum mechanics #Raman scattering #Raman spectroscopy #Resonance (particle physics) #Resonator #Vibration #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.100.062501
published as Phys. Rev. A 100, 062501 (2019) · 19 pages, 17 figures
openalex publication_date 2019/12/02 · arxiv created 2019/12/07 · arxiv updated 2019/12/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
To observe the dynamical Casimir effect (DCE) induced by a moving mirror is a long-standing challenge because the mirror velocity needs to approach the speed of light. Here, we present an experimentally feasible method for observing this mechanical DCE in an optomechanical system. It employs a detuned, parametric driving to squeeze a cavity mode, so that the mechanical mode, with a typical resonance frequency, can parametrically and resonantly couple to the squeezed cavity mode, thus leading to a resonantly amplified DCE in the squeezed frame. The DCE process can be interpreted as mechanically induced two-photon hyper-Raman scattering in the laboratory frame. Specifically, a photon pair of the parametric driving absorbs a single phonon and then is scattered into an anti-Stokes sideband. We also find that the squeezing, which additionally induces and amplifies the DCE, can be extremely small. Our method requires neither an ultrahigh mechanical-oscillation frequency (i.e., a mirror moving at nearly the speed of light) nor an ultrastrong single-photon optomechanical coupling and, thus, could be implemented in a wide range of physical systems.