Lecture Series by Vittorio Peano on Cavity Optomechanics: Lecture 2

Lecture Series by Vittorio Peano (MPL):
Cavity optomechanics from basic concepts to advanced applications
The tail of a comet always points away from the sun. Back in the 17th century, Kepler explained this observation proposing that light exerts a force on matter, the so-called radiation pressure force. Four hundreds years later technological progress has allowed to study this force in a completely different playground: high-finesse cavities allow to concentrate very high radiation intensities on lightweight mechanical devices that are exceptionally well shielded from the neighbouring environment. In these cavity-optomechanics platforms, the radiation pressure force can have a strong impact on the mechanical component on a time scale that can be shorter that the typical time for absorbing a single phonon from the environment. This has allowed to reach landmark achievements like cooling a mechanical oscillator to its ground state, squeezing the electromagnetic vacuum and measuring gravitational waves. In this series of lectures, I will give a didactic overview of the field of cavity optomechanics.
Monday: Motivation, radiation forces, optomechanical Hamiltonian, and optomechanical platforms
Tuesday: Precision sensing, gravitational interferometers and standard quantum limit
Wednesday: Basic physical effects, squeezing, cooling, entanglement
Thursday: Multimode optomechanics including applications like routers and frequency conversions
Friday: Nonlinear and topological optomechanics