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ISS: Intersectional Sessions

ISS 1: Micro Mechanical Oscillator 1 (Q, TT)

ISS 1.7: Talk

Monday, March 14, 2011, 12:00–12:15, HSZ 02

Stochastically activated opto-mechanical coupling — •Andrea Mari and Jens Eisert — Institute of Physics and Astronomy, University of Potsdam, 14476 Potsdam, Germany

We study the effect of stochastic noise on the standard opto-mechanical setup: an optical cavity with a vibrating mirror. We show how to engineer an effective bath for the mechanical resonator by using only incoherent thermal light. Thanks to the non-linear interaction Hamiltonian, optical stochastic noise can activate the coupling between a mechanical mode of the mirror and an optical mode of the cavity. This interaction can generate several non-trivial effects, e.g. the counter-intuitive process of cooling with thermal noise. This is another instance - different from stochastic resonance - where somewhat counterintuitively, incoherent noise helps to generate coherent quantum effects.