Aashish Clerk Abstract

Aashish Clerk
McGill University

Non-classical phonon & photon full counting statistics

A key goal in the field of quantum optomechanics is to measure truly quantum behaviour in a "large" mechanical resonator. One approach being actively pursued is to detect evidence of mechanical energy quantization via a QND measurement. In this talk, I will start by giving a quick introduction to optomechanics. I will then discuss recent experimentally-motivated theoretical work which calculates the full statistics of low-frequency energy fluctuations of a driven, quantum resonator. Surprisingly, the higher moments of these statistics are more sensitive to quantum effects than the variance. Even more strikingly, at low temperatures they are most most naturally described by a quasi-probability distribution which can be negative; this is similar to the statistics of charge transfer in superconducting systems. I will discuss how these effects might be measured (either in optomechanics or in circuit QED), and how they represent a kind of non-classical behaviour similar to the violation of a Leggett-Garg inequality.