@article {2516, title = {Beyond Spontaneous Emission: Giant Atom Bounded in Continuum}, year = {2019}, month = {12/20/2019}, abstract = {

The quantum coupling of individual superconducting qubits to microwave photons leads to remarkable experimental opportunities. Here we consider the phononic case where the qubit is coupled to an electromagnetic surface acoustic wave antenna that enables supersonic propagation of the qubit oscillations. This can be considered as a giant atom that is many phonon wavelengths long. We study an exactly solvable toy model that captures these effects, and find that this non-Markovian giant atom has a suppressed relaxation, as well as an effective vacuum coupling between a qubit excitation and a localized wave packet of sound, even in the absence of a cavity for the sound waves. Finally, we consider practical implementations of these ideas in current surface acoustic wave devices.\ 

}, url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.09980}, author = {Shangjie Guo and Yidan Wang and Thomas Purdy and J. M. Taylor} } @article {1820, title = {Cooling a harmonic oscillator by optomechanical modification of its bath}, journal = {Physical Review Letters}, volume = {118}, year = {2017}, month = {2017/05/31}, pages = {223602}, abstract = {

Optomechanical systems show tremendous promise for high sensitivity sensing of forces and modification of mechanical properties via light. For example, similar to neutral atoms and trapped ions, laser cooling of mechanical motion by radiation pressure can take single mechanical modes to their ground state. Conventional optomechanical cooling is able to introduce additional damping channel to mechanical motion, while keeping its thermal noise at the same level, and as a consequence, the effective temperature of the mechanical mode is lowered. However, the ratio of temperature to quality factor remains roughly constant, preventing dramatic advances in quantum sensing using this approach. Here we propose an approach for simultaneously reducing the thermal load on a mechanical resonator while improving its quality factor. In essence, we use the optical interaction to dynamically modify the dominant damping mechanism, providing an optomechanically-induced effect analogous to a phononic band gap. The mechanical mode of interest is assumed to be weakly coupled to its heat bath but strongly coupled to a second mechanical mode, which is cooled by radiation pressure coupling to a red detuned cavity field. We also identify a realistic optomechanical design that has the potential to realize this novel cooling scheme.

}, doi = {doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.223602}, url = {https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.223602}, author = {Xunnong Xu and Thomas Purdy and J. M. Taylor} }