Characterization of non-linearities through mechanical squeezing in levitated optomechanics

Ashley Setter, Jamie Vovrosh, and Hendrik Ulbricht

We demonstrate a technique to estimate the strength of nonlinearities present in the trapping potential of an optically levitated nanoparticle. By applying a brief pulsed reduction in the trapping laser power of the system such as to squeeze the phase space distribution and then matching the time evolution of the shape of the phase space distribution to that of numerical simulations, one can estimate the strength of the nonlinearity present in the system. We apply this technique to estimate the strength of the Duffing nonlinearity present in the optical trapping potential.We would like to thank C. Timberlake for comments on this manuscript as well as M. Toroš, T. Georgescu, and M. Rashid for discussions. We also wish to thank the Leverhulme Trust and the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) for funding. A. Setter is supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under the Center for Doctoral Training Grant No. EP/L015382/1. We also acknowledge support from the EU FET project TEQ (Grant Agreement No. 766900). In addition, the authors acknowledge the use of the IRIDIS High Performance Computing Facility and associated support services at the University of Southampton. All data supporting this study are openly available from the University of Southampton repository at https://doi.org/10.5258/SOTON/D0967. The code used to analyze the data is openly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1042526.

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