The Optomechanical Response of a Cubic Anharmonic Oscillator

Abstract

The nonlinearity of a mechanical oscillator may lead to the generation of the macroscopic quantum states, which are useful for precision measurement. Measuring the nonlinearity of a mechanical oscillator becomes important in order to effectively assess its performance. In this paper, we study the electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in an optomechanical system with a cubic nonlinear movable mirror. In the presence of the nonlinearity of the movable mirror, we show that the intensity of the output probe field exhibits an asymmetric shape with the transparency peak shifted to a frequency lower than the cavity resonance frequency. This shift can be used to measure the nonlinearity strength of the movable mirror. We also show that the mechanical nonlinearity gives rise to the enhancement of the intensity of the second-order upper sideband generation.