Quantum Measurement of Phonon Shot Noise

We provide a full quantum mechanical analysis of a weak energy measurement of a driven mechanical resonator. We demonstrate that measurements too weak to resolve individual mechanical Fock states can nonetheless be used to detect the nonclassical energy fluctuations of the driven mechanical resonator, i.e., “phonon shot noise”. We also show that the third moment of the oscillator’s energy fluctuations provides a far more sensitive probe of quantum effects than the second moment, and that measuring the third moment via the phase shift of light in an optomechanical setup directly yields the type of operator ordering postulated in the theory of full-counting statistics.

Figure 1

(a) Third moment $⟨⟨m^3⟩⟩$ of integrated energy fluctuations resulting from phonon shot noise, as a function of the drive detuning $\delta$, for different $n_{\mathrm{th}}$. (b) Zoom of plot in (a), showing that at low temperatures, $⟨⟨m^3⟩⟩$ can become negative in the quantum limit.